State-of-the-Art

Rock Print If you stack layer upon layer of small stones atop one another, what you eventually get is a pile of stones, but when you add strings, the whole process would be different. That’s the idea behind Rock Print, an installation at the Chicago Architecture Biennial created by Gramazio Kohler Research of ETH Zurich and Skylar Tibbits of MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab, which uses just these two elements to create a four-legged column that is self-supporting and can be quite unraveled into its constituent parts after use.

The key difference of this project is that there is not any control over every individual piece, where as in our project, we have control over every bit of the structure.

Armadillo Vault

The Armadillo Vault was the centrepiece of the “Beyond Bending” exhibition at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Alejandro Aravena, which was held in Venice, Italy, from May 28 to November 27, 2016. Its funicular geometry allows it to stand in pure compression, while tension ties equilibrate the form. Starting from the same structural and constructional principles as historic stone cathedrals, this form emerged from computational graphic statics-based design and optimisation methods.

This vault is comprised of 399 individually cut limestone pieces, unreinforced and assembled without mortar and it spans 16m with a thickness of 5cm. the key difference of this project is that they machined the stones whereas in our project machining the stones was one of the redlines that we didn’t cross.

Image by: Alexandero Aravena

Cyclopean Cannibalism

Cyclopean Cannibalism argues for the ingestion of waste materials to generate new structures. It links two islands of knowledge: ancient stone-fitting techniques and contemporary computational tools. It perceives cyclopean masonry as a living system that ingests urban debris to generate new, flexible building systems. Technique is prioritized over final form, with mass-customized units robotically carved to generate a single system.

Image by: Acadia

Bartlett Unit 17 Ghost House

A group of year 4 students from The Bartlett School of Architecture’s has done a construction project in West Galway, Ireland. The project aims to create a ‘ghost’ of the existing St Macdara chapel located on a remote island off the coast of Connemara.

They built a negative skeleton of the existing Macdara chapel to create a web of gaps which has formed the main enclosure.

What they did was quite similar to our project, in terms of understanding the geometries. They tried to understand the geometry of that chapel and then they constructed the negative of that structure by another material.