Building with earth seems a sensible ambition in our troubled climatic times. A fundamental problem, though, is being able to make larger, more complex structures from earth without jettisoning its unique sustainable and artisan qualities at the domestic and sub-domestic scales. Architecture and robotics specialist and co-founder of EZCT Architecture & Design Research Jelle Feringa considers the concepts and issues involved.
Unbelievably huge amounts of concrete, a major contributor to our contemporary world, are produced every year, and this continues to increase exponentially. ETH Zurich researchers Timothy Wangler, Yamini Patankar and Robert J Flatt explain the pros and cons of the digital fabrication of concrete, and the research still to be done in this relatively young and experimental subset of the construction industry and material science.
Crushing concrete liberated from demolished buildings to provide recycled aggregate is argued to be a sustainable way of reducing material extraction. Yet, in these high-energy processes, large amounts of new cement is often used, negating this as a low-carbon activity. Professor of Architecture and Structural Design at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) Corentin Fivet and his co-authors highlight the advantages of utilising second-hand uncrushed concrete while augmenting traditional equipment to remarkable tactile and optimum effect.
The world of patents has always expanded exponentially in line with innovative inventions and materials, and this has been particularly true in the first few decades of the 21st century, which have delivered numerous construction materials and jointing and bonding techniques. ETH Zurich's Silke Langenberg, Sarah M Schlachetzki and Robin Rehm draw attention to the fact that within the academic field of construction heritage, little research has been done to review historical patents for possible sustainable construction materials and methods left by the wayside in the pursuit of industrialised architectural modernism.
The use of robotics in construction has been experimented with for nearly fifty years. Selen Ercan Jenny, Guest-Editor of this AD, and Abel Gawel, Principal Researcher in Computer Vision and Machine Learning with the Huawei European Research Center, run us through a brief history of such developments, and describe the sustainable advantages of contemporary research in this field alongside the many hurdles still to be overcome to achieve the full adoption of robots on construction sites.
Romana Rust and Inés Ariza illustrate how digital fabrication projects developed by Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich are using innovative software pipelines and producing more collaborative software and digitally driven techniques to illicit much more dynamic and sustainably effective interfaces between machines and humans for the construction industry. Rust is a computational architect and Head of Research and Innovation at vyzn AG, and Ariza is an architect and researcher within the NCCR Digital Fabrication consortium at Gramazio Kohler Research, and R&D Project Lead at MESH AG.
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