JANE BURRY / JENNY SABIN / BOB SHEIL / MARILENA SKAVARA
FABRICATE 2020 MAKING RESILIENT ARCHITECTURE JANE BURRY / JENNY SABIN / BOB SHEIL / MARILENA SKAVARA
CONTENTS
4
Foreword Christoph Lindner Zoe Laughlin Frédéric Migayrou
6
Acknowledgements
8
Introduction Jane Burry Jenny Sabin
12
From Making Digital Architecture to Making Resilient Architecture Bob Sheil
1: BIO-MATERIALITY 22 MUD Frontiers Virginia San Fratello Ronald Rael 28 The Design and Fabrication of Confluence Park Andrew Kudless Joshua Zabel Chuck Naeve Tenna Florian 36 The Role of Robotic Milling in the Research and Development of the Cork Construction Kit Oliver Wilton Matthew Barnett Howland Peter Scully 42 Pulp Faction: 3D printed material assemblies through microbial biotransformation Ana Goidea Dimitrios Floudas David Andréen 50 From Machine Control to Material Programming: Self-shaping wood manufacturing of a high performance curved CLT structure – Urbach Tower Dylan Wood Philippe Grönquist Simon Bechert Lotte Aldinger David Riggenbach Katharina Lehmann Markus Rüggeberg Ingo Burgert Jan Knippers Achim Menges
58 Bending the Line: Zippered wood creating nonorthogonal architectural assemblies using the most common linear building component (the 2x4) Blair Satterfield Alexander Preiss Derek Mavis Graham Entwistle Marc Swackhamer Matthew Hayes 66 Biocomposites from Annually Renewable Resources Displaying Vision of Future Sustainable Architecture: Design and fabrication of two 1:1 demonstrators Hanaa Dahy Jan Petrš Piotr Baszyński 74 Cellulosic Biocomposites for Sustainable Manufacturing Stylianos Dritsas Yadunund Vijay Samuel Halim Ryan Teo Naresh Sanandiya Javier G. Fernandez 2: SYNTHESISING DESIGN AND PRODUCTION 84 Kuwait International Airport Terminal 2: Engineering and fabrication of a complex parametric megastructure Lucio Blandini Guido Nieri 92 A Factory on the Fly: Exploring the structural potential of cyber-physical construction Asbjørn Søndergaard Radu Becus Gabriella Rossi Kyle Vansice Rahul Attraya Austin Devin
100 Direct-to-Drawing: Automation in extruded terracotta fabrication Scott Overall John Paul Rysavy Clinton Miller William Sharples Christopher Sharples Sameer Kumar Andrea Vittadini Victoire Saby
140 Fabrication and Application of 3D-Printed Concrete Structural Components in the Baoshan Pedestrian Bridge Project Weiguo Xu Yuan Gao Chenwei Sun Zhi Wang
108 The Tide [Phase 1]: Greenwich Peninsula, London Emmanuel Verkinderen Bryce Suite Ryan Neiheiser Edoardo Tibuzzi Jeg Dudley
150 Q&A 1 Antoine Picon with Julia Barfield and Kai Strehlke Moderated by Jenny Sabin
116 Making Form Work: Experiments along the grain of concrete and timber Sasa Zivkovic Leslie Lok 124 Additive Fabrication of Concrete Elements by Robots: Lightweight concrete ceiling Georg Hansemann Robert Schmid Christoph Holzinger Joshua P. Tapley Hoang Kim Huy Valentino Sliskovic Bernhard Freytag Andreas Trummer Stefan Peters 130 DFAB House: A comprehensive demonstrator of digital fabrication in architecture Konrad Graser Marco Baur Aleksandra Anna Apolinarska Kathrin Dörfler Norman Hack Andrei Jipa Ena Lloret-Fritschi Timothy Sandy Daniel Sanz Pont Daniel M. Hall Matthias Kohler
Q&A
156 Q&A 2 Monica Ponce de Leon with Cristiano Ceccato Moderated by Jenny Sabin 162 Q&A 3 Carl Bass with Philippe Block Moderated by Jane Burry 168 Q&A 4 Mette Ramsgaard Thomsen with Meejin Yoon Moderated by Jane Burry 174 Q&A BIOGRAPHIES 3: OPTIMISATION FOR A CHANGING WORLD 178 Architectural Scale Kagome Weaving: Design methods and fabrication concepts Phil Ayres Adam Orlinski Moritz Heimrath Soraya Bornaz Alison Grace Martin 186 Rethinking Efficient Shell Structures with 3D-Printed Formwork Xiang Wang Chun Pong So Liming Zhang Zhewen Chen Philip F. Yuan
194 KnitCandela: Challenging the construction, logistics, waste and economy of concreteshell formwork Mariana Popescu Matthias Rippmann Tom Van Mele Philippe Block 202 Printed Assemblages: A co-evolution of composite tectonics and additive manufacturing techniques Roland Snooks Laura Harper 210 Large-Scale Free-Form Timber Grid Shell: Digital planning of the new Swatch headquarters in Biel, Switzerland Hanno Stehling Fabian Scheurer Sylvain Usai 218 Optimisation of Robotic Printing Paths for Structural Stiffness Using Machine Learning Zeynep Aksöz Samuel Wilkinson Giannis Nikas 226 The Anatomy of a Skeleton: Hybrid processes for largescale robotic fabrication Emmanuel Vercruysse 234 BUGA Fibre Pavilion: Towards roboticallyfabricated composite building structures Serban Bodea Niccolo Dambrosio Christoph Zechmeister Marta Gil Pérez Valentin Koslowski Bas Rongen Moritz Dörstelmann Ondrej Kyjanek Jan Knippers Achim Menges
4: POLEMICAL PERFORMATIVE PRACTICE 246 Embedded Architecture: Ada, driven by humans, powered by AI Jenny E. Sabin John Hilla Dillon Pranger Clayton Binkley Jeremy Bilotti 256 Diagrams of Entropic Forces: Design for new dissipative fabrication Philip Beesley 264 Discrete Timber Assembly Gilles Retsin 272 Towards Discrete Automation Mollie Claypool 280 House #05: Incremental construction in digital practice Paul Loh David Leggett 286 Concrete Choreography: Prefabrication of 3D-printed columns Ana Anton Patrick Bedarf Angela Yoo Lex Reiter Timothy Wangler Robert J. Flatt Benjamin Dillenburger 294 Little Island: Sculptural structure through digital design and fabrication Yong-Wook Jo Rosario Gallo David Farnsworth Jacob Wiest 302 Hudson Yards Vessel, New York Edoardo Tibuzzi Pablo Zamorano Peter Romvari Jeg Dudley
310 Editors: Biographies 311 Contributors: Biographies 320 Partners / Colophon
280 281
HOUSE #05 INCREMENTAL CONSTRUCTION IN DIGITAL PRACTICE PAUL LOH UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE DAVID LEGGETT LLDS / POWER TO MAKE
House #05 explores the integration of custom moulds with a proprietary construction system for in-situ concrete casting (Fig. 2). The project foregrounds a design methodology that allows the fabrication procedure to drive the design process, primarily using tooling and construction procedures as agents to inform the architectural design.
the axe head emerges through a continuous process of shaping the material to eventually produce a useful form that is fit for purpose. Every strike on the flint by the maker informs the following strike until the stone is incrementally shaped. It implies that design is a process that develops through the act of making and requires a positive feedback loop (Johnson, 2001).
The design methodology is made possible through the setup of LLDS’s practice, where the architectural studio also fabricates building components. The project devises a unique digital workflow that incorporates feedback and evaluation of as-built information into the live design data to incrementally modify the fabrication information for construction. The aim is to overcome the challenges of integrating highly precise digitally-fabricated components to suit the on-site condition, specifically the interfaces between different work packages (Denari, 2012). The project asks: Can this very pragmatic desire allow digital fabrication to challenge the design through making?
House#05 adopts Malafouris’s notion of material engagement into practice, whereby the making and digital fabrication techniques lead the design through a continual process. That is to say that the tooling and making procedure are deliberately privileged above other criteria to inform the design. Here, the project demonstrates a methodology of designing in which digital fabrication is much more akin to a traditional sense of craftmanship (Pye, 1968) where construction constraints and opportunities are fed back into the making procedure. The research asks: If tooling can inform the design process, then how can the construction procedure produce feedback that can also shape the design?
In studying the making of tools in archelogy, Lambros Malafouris (2016) proposed that the prehistoric man makes tools, such as an axe head, without picturing the shape of the tool in the flint stone. Instead, the design of
1
282 283
2
3
Context and Background
Design Intent
House#05 is a single dwelling situated in a narrow four-metre-wide leftover site in the inner suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. The house is conditioned by the existing terrace typology with two boundary walls. Responding to the lack of garden space for the dwelling, the roof of the house is conceived as an elevated ‘plant pot’, which is raised eight metres above the ground so that it receives natural daylight and is not overshadowed by neighbouring buildings. The void below the roof becomes the dwelling. The roof is supported by two concrete boundary walls that are anchored to the ground, forming a three-metre-deep concrete plinth. The plinth contains the most private spaces of the dwelling: the snug, bedrooms, utilities and bathrooms. In this project, digital fabrication is utilised across multiple packages of work. This paper will focus on the in-situ concrete package to examine the workflow of incremental construction.
The boundary of the terrace typology set up a condition where the parallel walls create a flutter echo effect in the open plan interior. To reduce the echo effect, the design intent is to texture the surfaces of the off-form concrete to scatter the sound (Brady and Olesen, 2010). While the effect is simulated in digital model using a ray-tracing methodology, the physical acoustic test has not yet been performed at the time of writing. The fair-faced concrete is exposed internally, providing thermal mass to regulate the environment, especially useful with Melbourne’s extreme temperature changes.
LLDS has a unique setup. Alongside its architectural practice, it operates a 500m2 micro-manufacturing workshop with a three-axis CNC router and a seven-axis robotic arm (Fig. 3). The parallel mode of making and designing allows for a fluid dialogue, from experimentation to the integration of research into construction workflow. It allows the practice to fabricate construction components and integrates them into a standard building contract for the project. The integration of digitally-fabricated components with a proprietary construction technique enables the practice to manage the level of complexity associated with the construction. It allows for a more natural adaption of such techniques by small-scale contractors that predominantly operate within the bespoke housing market in Australia.
To achieve the textured concrete, CNC-fabricated moulds are inserted into a proprietary formwork system. The pattern for the concrete formwork is produced by generating a series of parallel lines as toolpath in Grasshopper 3D, which is visually simulated in RhinoCAM. The tooling is performed on a polyisocyanurate (PIR) panel coated with a two-part polyurethane coating that forms a hard impact-resistant surface. The thickness varies depending on whether the mould is applied to the interior wall or external retaining wall. The coating provides a smooth and gloss finish to the cast as well as acting as a release agent. The PIR is re-used as insulation for the cavity wall and screeded floor. LLDS partnered with an off-form concreter to develop the fabrication procedure. The off-form concreter proposed the use of the PERI™ DUO system – a modular formwork that does not require a crane and provides a self-supporting scaffolding system; the requirement for this was also partly driven by the tight site constraints. The design team integrated the associated procedural knowledge into
4
1. MDF mould of the vaulted soffit tightly fitted on site. Image: LLDS. 2. House #05 in-situ concrete soffit and wall using robotic milled formwork. Image: LLDS. 3. Robotic milling of House #05 building component and various prototypes. Image: LLDS. 4. Prototypes are used to assess buildability and milling time to reduce the cost of the mould. Image: LLDS. 5. Resulting pleated visual effect to the concrete wall. Image: LLDS. 6. Visualisation of the entire toolpath for the concrete mould for House #05. Image: LLDS.
5
the design and production of the PIR mould, such as splitting the panels for site assembly, and the day joint associated with the pour sequence. The project used a self-compacting concrete by Holcim™ to avoid vibration which could otherwise damage the mould. Designing Through Tooling Prior to engaging with the concreter, the practice developed over 15 prototypes (Fig. 4). In the experiment, a standard concrete mix was used. The texture is based on a standard tool profile with variation to the depth of the toolpath. Early prototypes (Figs 4A–4J) explored the textural potential of the surface. The marking left by the tool produces depth to the surface. Of the tools tested, only a small portion proved to be feasible, as some formed undercuts which made the mould challenging to remove (Figs 4B & 4C). Some created an extrusion that was too fine and easily damaged when the mould was struck (Figs 4F–4I). The tool’s profile, cut depth and width conditioned the pattern but at the same time provided a series of unique aesthetics that were useful for the design process. The resulting pleated pattern (Figs 4K, 4M, 4N) was developed based on an interference of two sets of toolpaths which produced variable pleating across the surface (Fig. 5).
6
284 285
Following the first pour of the wall, the as-built information was captured using a high-resolution environment scanner. The point cloud model was aligned with the Rhino 3D model to re-evaluate the fabrication data. As the PIR panel had shifted along the length, the pattern and tie bars in the upper level were misaligned – in some areas by up to 10mm. As the tie bar position is the primary interface between the PIR and the formwork, only the holes and the vertices of the toolpath were re-aligned to allow the pattern to remain continuous (Fig. 9). The point cloud identified areas of discrepancy and error, such as edges where the vaulted soffit rests were found to be 5 to 10mm out of plumb. While this is within the tolerance of the concrete structure, it would cause the soffit mould to misalign and create large gaps between the mould (Fig. 1). The two-step milling procedure of the mould allowed the final geometry of the soffit to be adjusted and trimmed by the robotic arm to match the as-built geometry (Fig. 10).
Tooling Geometry To understand the constraints of the tooling, the toolpath was tested on several geometric scenarios. The linear motion of the toolpath produced an unresolved design when applied to a radial layout. However, the transition of depth works best when the linear toolpath is maintained, and variation in height is used to deliver a transverse or diagonal shift across the topography. This technique is applied to the concrete soffit. For the final iteration of the soffit design, the tool paths converge into a series of vaults. Figure 6 visualises the toolpath for the entire project for fabrication. The vaulted soffit is a design response to the engineer’s requirement to add two 300mm-deep down stand beams to take the load of the green roof. For the soffit, a mediumdensity fibreboard (MDF) mould coated with a high gloss polyurethane is used instead of the PIR, as the mould needs to support the weight of reinforcement bars prior to pouring the concrete. The mould is first milled using the three-axis CNC router and is finished with a final set of toolpaths using the Kuka KR120 robotic arm (Fig. 7). The two-step process helps reduce excessive waste, but critically allows the layer of MDF that makes up the mould to be screw-fixed from the underside. As each mould weighs up to 180kg, when the concreters strike the formwork, the mould is removed in layers from the underside to ensure the full weight does not collapse on the workers. The fabrication workflow uses tooling and construction procedures to inform the design and deals with the practical demands of the mould. It integrates the constraints and opportunities of the proprietary system within a self-contained digital workflow (Fig. 8). Lessons learned from the various prototypes feedback into the detailing, such as the articulation around cast-in power sockets, and the alignment of the toolpath around the tie points and its interface at the joint line. The tie holes are plugged with brass plates which are sometimes used for handrails, coat hooks and picture hangers to support the inhabitation of the room.
7
Incremental Construction in Practice In this project, LLDS put into practice a ‘just-in-time’ method of fabrication in which the fabrication data was aligned with the site information. The research highlighted the importance of looping in the as-built information as part of the file-to-production protocol. The use of fabrication information as a live data set to incrementally inform the design and construction also helps to avoid the contractor manually hacking precise components for them to fit on site.
8
7. Robotic milling of the soffit mould at LLDS workshop. The set-up of the practice allowed for an integrated workflow from design to production. Image: LLDS. 8. Digital workflow incorporating two layers of feedback to the final design. Image: Paul Loh.
Negotiating As-Built Tolerance to Construct Feedback When the PIR mould panels were installed on-site, each being 4 metres tall and 0.9 metres wide, the main tolerance issue was caused by the proprietary modular formwork panels, which varied in width by up to +/1.5mm. This led to creep in the tie hole positions along the 13-metre long wall, resulting in misalignment with the corresponding holes within the PIR mould panels.
9. Point cloud scan of the as-built data overlay with the machine toolpaths. Image: Paul Loh. 9
10. The concrete soffit after striking. Image: LLDS.
The practice set-up and the partnership with the concreter provided a unique opportunity in this project to design, fabricate, construct, survey and readjust the fabrication data to account for site discrepancy. The two layers of feedback allow the practice to challenge the design through making. First, using iterative prototypes, both physical and digital, the tooling and making procedure informs the design process. Second, the scanned as-built data informs the fabrication process and allows the practice to be nimble in responding to site tolerance and error. These feedback loops are rare in construction as it’s time-consuming and not often cost-efficient. However, the feedback processes create an agile workflow that begins to address the messy nature of on-site construction. The result is an incremental construction methodology that enabled LLDS to embed architectural detailing within the digital workflow, encoding craft into the algorithms.
10 Acknowledgements Architects: LLDS – Paul Loh, David Leggett and Yuanye Huang Concrete Structural Engineer: Bollinger + Grohmann Ingenieure – Sascha Bohnenberger and Bernhard Waschl Off-form Concreter: Roniak Construction – Nick Angelopoulos Formwork Fabricator: Power to Make References Brady, P. and Olesen, T. 2010. ‘Integrating Sound Scattering Measurements in the Design of Complex Architectural Surfaces: Informing a parametric design strategy with acoustic measurements from rapid prototype scale models’, in FUTURE CITIES, 28th eCAADe Conference Proceedings. Zurich: ETH Zurich, pp. 481–491. Denari, N. 2012. ‘Precise form for an imprecise world.’, in Marble, S. (ed.) Digital Workflows in Architecture. Basel: Birkhäuser, pp. 28–43. Johnson, S. 2001. Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities, and software. New York: Scribner. Malafouris, L. 2016. How Things Shape the Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Pye, D. 1968. The Nature & Art of Workmanship. Chippenham, UK: A & C Black.