19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia curated by Carlo Ratti. Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective.
Pavilion of Türkiye, Arsenale: Grounded / Yerebatan. Documentary film: Arsenale, section Artificial
Anti-Ruin is a three-metre gate printed from marble dust. Designed by OZRUH, it reverses the logic of a ruin: instead of a finished building slowly falling into fragments, it starts as fragments and is meant to grow, come apart and be recombined. Twelve printed blocks form two independent assemblies: a cantilevered beam carried by one column, and a second column that stands free, just short of the beam’s end, so that each part can be moved, reconfigured or added to separately.
The material is a by-product. Fines from the Lasa marble quarry in South Tyrol, generated in almost the same volume as the stone the quarry sells, were used as the printing powder, with a material system developed together with the Chair of Sustainable Construction at ETH Zurich.
The blocks were produced in four weeks on the large-scale binder jet printer of the Chair of Digital Building Technologies, an updated version of the system built for Arzo. Design and printing overlapped: observations from the first prints led to a coarser pattern and deeper cavities in the later blocks, revised locally without redesigning the whole. Each block is hollow, with internal structural sections behind the articulated surface, and was printed without moulds or formwork; the loose powder supports every layer and is reused. The hollowing removes about a third of the material of the solid volume, most of it in the cantilever, where bending allows mass to be taken from the core. After depowdering, each part was sanded and finished by hand.
Before shipping, the first column was put together as a test at ETH Zurich. Two people and a forklift stacked it in about an hour; it was then taken apart again, palletised and sent to Venice. The test confirmed what the dry-joint design promises: a printed stone structure that can be assembled, dismantled and moved with ordinary site equipment.
On site, the blocks were stacked with dry joints and no mortar. The beam is held together by steel rods running through ducts formed during printing and tensioned against end plates, unbonded, so the structure can be taken down and rebuilt in another configuration.
Alongside the installation in the Pavilion of Türkiye, a documentary following the project from the quarry to the print bed was shown in the Biennale’s main exhibition at the Arsenale.
Anti-Ruin tested the binder jet system at full architectural scale: twelve differentiated blocks produced in series, transported and assembled without mortar or formwork, each printed as the finished element rather than as a mould for another material. It shows that stone waste can become load-bearing, demountable building parts, and opens a route towards components printed close to where quarry and demolition residues arise.
