A Swiss house built by robots promises to revolutionize the construction industry
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Swiss house built by robots promises to revolutionize the construction industry
By Anne Quito in Switzerland September 12, 2019
Erecting a new building ranks among the most
inefficient, polluting activities humans undertake. The construction sector is
responsible for nearly 40% of the world’s total energy consumption and CO2
emissions, according to a UN global survey.
A consortium
of Swiss researchers has one answer to the problem: working with robots. The
proof of concept comes in the form of the DFAB House, celebrated as the first habitable
building designed and planned using a choreography of digital fabrication
methods.
The
three-level building near Zurich features 3D-printed ceilings, energy-efficient
walls, timber beams assembled by robots on site, and an intelligent home
system. Developed by a team of experts at ETH Zurich university and 30 industry
partners over the course of four years, the DFAB House, measuring 2,370 square
feet (220 square meters), needed 60% less cement and has passed the stringent
Swiss building safety codes.
“This is a new
way of seeing architecture,” says Matthias Kohler, a member of DFAB’s research
team. The work of architects has long been presented in terms of designing
inspiring building forms, while the technical specifics of construction has
been relegated to the background. Kohler thinks this is quickly changing.
“Suddenly how we use resources to build our habitats is at the center of
architecture,” he argues. “How you build matters.”
DFAB isn’t the
first building project to use digital fabrication techniques. In 2014, Chinese
company WinSun demonstrated the architectural
potential of 3D printing by manufacturing 10 single-story
houses in one day. A year later, the Shanghai-based company also printed an
apartment building and a neoclassical mansion,
but these projects remain in the development phase.
Kohler
explains that beating construction speed records wasn’t necessarily their goal.
“Of course we’re interested in gaining breakthroughs in speed and economy, but
we tried to hold to the idea of quality first,” he says. “You can do things
very, very fast but that doesn’t mean that it’s actually sustainable.”
Man and machine
Any mention of
automation necessarily conjures concerns about robots edging humans out of
their jobs. But Kohler believes that embracing technology will actually augment
human creativity and even foster a revival of craftsmanship. “Like a craftsman
may have an iPhone in his pocket, I think that future machines will be less
separated from human.”
How will this
work? Kohler says that partnering with robots means letting the result of
machine processes inform the design. Instead of forcing machines to fake
handmade surfaces, he suggests that there’s a totally new aesthetic that
results from working with digital fabrication. The DFAB House’s ornamental
ceiling, created with a large-scale 3D sand printer, hints at these decorative
possibilities.
Benjamin
Dillenburger, the 3D printing specialist in DFAB’s team, adds that learning to
work with robots may even safeguard the health of construction workers. “One
should not romanticize the jobs on the construction sites,” he warns. “[It] really
makes sense to have this kind of collaborative setups where robots and human
work together.”
Beyond the experimental structure in Switzerland, Kohler and Dillenburger
explain that they’re interested in fostering a dialogue with the global
architecture and construction sectors. They’ve published their open-source data sets and
have organized a traveling exhibition titled “How to Build a House:
Architectural Research in the Digital Age,” opening at the Cooper
Union in New York this week.
Nader Tehrani,
the school’s dean of architecture, hopes to attract a broad audience to the
free exhibition, which runs until Oct. 13. “We had imagined that it would be of
interest not only to architects, but also to engineers, artists, and builders,”
he says. “At once sober, rational, and thoughtful, the research in this project
is also projective, unprecedented, and speculative.”
Dillenburger
believes the DFAB House will be interesting even to those outside the
architecture and construction sectors. “Architecture is always a public
project,” he says. “It’s for anyone curious about how we’re building for the
future.”
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