Clay 3D Printing

CLAY 3 D PRINTING

When digital manufacturing meet traditonal material

The tool making aspect in contemporary times is best captured by the scientific discipline of Architectural geometry / Geometry processing and sets the scene for its use architects to help organize the lives of the consumers of architecture.

Architectural Geometry aims to capture within geometry, essentials aspects of structure, fabrication, function, environment, etc. In other words, the rapidly maturing AG field provides the rigorous mathematical guarantees and intuitive, exploration friendly geometric tool-kit to enable architects to explore and deliver the agenda of performancebased architecture into the mainstream. When the so enabled exploratory process, leads to a stylistic expression of structural, fabrication related textures, and other ‘tectonic’ features, it yields tectonism.

Clay printing workshop aims to test the possibilities of digital manufacturing with traditional material. T h e w o r k s h o p e x p l o r i n g : ( 1 ) c o n s t r u c t i n g a digital to physical tool-chain (2) computational geometry and c++ programming for architect (3) robot kinematics, constraints and synergetic geometries (4) exploration and exploitation of associated design spaces (the space of plausible geometries and textures).

Our research focuses on the relationship between material characteristics and digital manufacturing tools. According to the result of manual testing of clay characteristics. We realize viscosity and plasticity are important natures from clay and that allows us to shape the model through robot arm. The fnal results demonstrate the material characteristics through the texture and structure of our clay models. The model on the left shows how we control the pattern through viscosity, and the model on the other side explains the plasticity by extruding the model not only horizontally but also vertically. To achieve the result, we self-learnt about and implemented everything from hardware components purchasing, extruder design and construction, c++ code, robot gcode, material recipes, logistics planning in one short month.

"We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us."

by John M. Culkin

Below: 3D clay printing with self made extruder and Kuka robot arms