Statement about the Research Content and Process

Description

This research project is comprised of a series of 13 prototypical transdisciplinary investigations into the agility and fragility of postdigital design. Various teams were established with distinct expertise, with an aim to liberate architectural design from superseded digital techniques while also addressing economic and ecological issues. Alternative design and fabrication strategies were developed to scale-up, adapt and modify existing 3D-printing technologies for the built environment. Software and hardware innovations developed for the series are now widely available.

Questions

1. How can contemporary architecture enable transdisciplinary collaboration and re-engage in a wider social and cultural discourse?

2. How has digital design and theory evolved from previous decades to the postdigital?

3. Which innovative twentieth-century technological solutions, materials and processes are agile enough to allow a scaling-up of 3D printing for future implementation in the building industry?

4. How does postdigitality approach the fragile relationship between the artificial and natural and the technological and environmental, to move towards a hybrid ecology?

Methodology

1. Successive fabrication of complex and innovative prototypes;

2. Scaling-up of existing and new additive manufacturing techniques using bespoke industrial workflows and craft-related processes;

3. Development of bespoke software;

4. Development of bespoke hardware, processes and equipment;

5. Development of bespoke 3D-printable materials.

Dissemination

The prototypes have been exhibited internationally, including Ars Electronica in Linz and Paris Fashion Week. Several of the prototypes have been shown on national and international news and television programmes, including ORF Austria, ETV Estonia and the BBC. Colletti has co-edited one book, Meeting Nature Halfway: Architecture Interfaced between Technology and Environment (2018), which features some of the projects in the series. He has authored three articles in Architectural Design and eight book chapters related to the work. Colletti has presented the project in four keynotes at conferences in the UK, Italy, Czech Republic and Iran; nine invited presentations and ten lectures.

Project Highlights

The series has brought together skill sets from various branches of industry, other disciplines and crafts to achieve untested transdisciplinary synergies. The research on concrete 3D printing resulted in the development of a software-hardwarematerial package, the Baumit BauMinator®. It also generated the formation of a spin-off company in Austria, incremental3D. Software packages were developed that are now utilised by international institutions, as was specific hardware to adapt existing industry solutions to the specificities of 3D extrusion by robotic arms. The Chelsea Flower Show pavilion where Terrestrial Reef was installed was awarded a silver medal.

Statement of Inclusion of Earlier Work

The research expands from the prototype Plantolith (2013), which showcases the affordances and constraints of conventional 3D-printing processes (13).

3 (overleaf) Coralloid Cocoons, Ars Electronica, Linz, 2016. Structural, ornamental and porous coral-like sheltering cocoons were printed in concrete with a filigree layer of PLA using three industrial robots. The installation symbolises the metamorphosis of robotics in architecture, transforming from clumsy Fordian caterpillars to postdigital chrysalises.