2024

Digital Fabrication of Biologically Cemented Spatial Structures

The environmental impact of the construction industry demands sustainable alternatives to traditional concrete production. Microbially induced calcite precipitation (MICP) offers an alternative solution where microbes can produce biocemented structures at a low cost and ambient temperature. This study integrates MICP with nonplanar granular 3D printing methods, overcoming casting limitations such as geometrical constraints and uneven […]

2023

Prōtóplasto – an ultra lightweight plastic media installation

Prōtóplasto is an ultralight media installation exhibited at the innovation hub “Futurama” in Aargau, Switzerland. It is created with a novel constructive system pairing two new technologies: an innovative 3D printing method for polymers with very high build up rates which are similar to concrete extrusion, and 3D printed connections whose bespoke geometry enables support-free […]

2023

Airlements

This research investigates using foam 3D-printing of cement-free mineral foams from recycled waste for monolithic, lightweight, and insulated wall construction. It aims to reduce the amount of material, labor, and costs required for bespoke building parts by leveraging moldless fabrication through large-scale robotic 3D-printing. Using porous materials with different densities provides insulation and strength where […]

2022

Cold Production: Programming Concrete Openwork with Ice Formwork

Cold Production explores a zero-waste fabrication method for concrete that uses digitally sculpted ice as a moulding material. The project explored spatial concrete lattices and their stacking principles. Ice units were press-formed using 3D-printed multiparty moulds. The rapid and waste-free production is done in the Sub-Zero lab at -10C. The concrete was poured, cured, and […]

2021

FoamWork

 Building complex concrete elements that are optimized for resource efficiency requires custom formwork, which is often wasteful and labor-intensive to produce. FoamWork explores how foam 3D printing (F3DP) can be used to create unique shapes for functional stay-in-place or temporary and recyclable formwork in concrete casting. The printable mineral foams based on recycled waste […]

2021

Beyond Transparency: Robotically Enhanced Glass Architecture

Glass has played a key role in architecture not only bringing light into buildings and enabling views to the world around us. Throughout history, properties of color and form in glass, brought a transformative, sublime power to the material and to spaces. In the 20th century, the mass fabrication of glass enabled its use as a […]

2020

Digital Bamboo

The Digital Bamboo pavilion explores the innovative combination of a bio material with digital fabrication. Bamboo is an excellent sustainable building material, because of its rapid growth and very low weight-to-strength ratio. Customized computational tools were developed to design the ultra-lightweight structure, whose bespoke connections were manufactured using 3D printing technology. The structure covers more […]

2020

Fast Complexity

Concrete is responsible for 8% of our global carbon footprint. Now more than ever, it is imperative to use concrete more efficiently. With optimisation algorithms, we can design complex buildings that use less than half the amount of concrete. Still, we are limited by the available fabrication technologies: the conventional formwork solutions only allow us […]

2019

Concrete Choreography

  From ancient civilisations to the present day, columns have served as elements of architecture particularly tied to the harmony, balance and proportion of architectural orders – so much so that they have come to be recognised as works of art in their own right. What could the contemporary design of a new column order […]

2019

Docofossor

Docofossor is developed in collaboration with Ilmar Hurkxkens from the Chair of Landscape Architecture, ETH Zurich. Docofossor is a terrain modeling plugin for Rhino 6 + Grasshopper. It enables easy editing of cut and fill operations for landscape architecture. It is available for download on food4rhino.

2018

Axolotl

AXOLOTL provides a set of components for volumetric modeling in Rhino Grasshopper. They work based on the principle of signed distance functions (SDF). In boundary representations (BRep), objects are defined by vertices connected by edges and faces. In function representations (FRep), objects are defined by a function f that maps any point (x,y,z) to a real value d, the distance […]

dbt
2016

3D Printed Slab

Topology optimisation can be used as a design method to reduce material without affecting the functionality of an object. Despite being one of the most demanding economic sectors in terms of material consumption, the construction industry has not yet adopted such design methods. This is generally because computational optimisation algorithms produce complex solutions which are […]

2017

Digital Metal:  Shaping Liquid Pavilion

Digital Metal structure is a 4 meter wide, 6 meter long and 5 meter high space frame that consists of over 200 customised joints and over 400 meters of off-shelf aluminum-profiles. It was set as an experimental project to explore the potential of   3d printing  for producing sand mold to be used for casting metal […]

2017

Electrical Skin

“Electrical Skin” is a robotically 3D printed free-form façade-panel with integrated lighting. For the first time in architecture, not only the complex form, but also the electric infrastructure are fabricated in a single process. This project showcases how leaps in computation and digital fabrication can revolutionize architectural components.