In Back to the Future Part II, Marty McFly walks out into the 2015 Hill Valley, the camera panning to show the city as he says incredulously, “the future.” He walks around, dumbfounded by the rapid changes his city has made. It is a world of flying cars, holographic media screens, and futuristic-looking architecture. Unfortunately the real 2015 is more like the actual 1985, except that people are always staring and swiping at black rectangles and get offended a lot. Where is that sense of wonder that Marty shows?
Well, perhaps there is still hope. 3D-printed buildings might be able to deliver the stuff of BTTF. Imagine an army of autonomous 3D-printing robots, scurrying around like ants, excavating, processing, and casting moon rocks into a huge Corbusian (or New Urbanist, if that’s your thing) housing project. It could happen someday.
Image courtesy CCA
Image courtesy CCA
At California College of the Arts, Jason Kelly Johnson and Michael Shiloh have been leading students in research that is developing small Arduino-powered robots that can 3D print on rough terrain, and where traditional construction is hindered by logistics such as access or climate. The research is evolving at a breathtaking pace, and students Clayton Muhleman, Alan Cation, and Adithi Satish have built the latest project, called “Swarmscrapers,” which you can download as an Instructable. These machines are designed by and for architects, for the purpose of exploring the potential of such building technologies.
Image courtesy Caixin
Image courtesy Caixin
Image courtesy Caixin
The development of these robots, coupled with the insane progress Chinese builders Winsun Decoration Design Engineering Co., have been relentlessly printing buildings, including ten entire houses in 24 hours early last year. Now, just nine months later, they have upped the ante, printing a six-story apartment building and a mansion in Suzhou Industrial Park, in China’s Jiangsu Province. The buildings are looking less and less 3D-printed, which is a feat, considering that the apartment structure is nearly 12,000 square feet. The process is efficient and relatively environmentally-sensitive to boot.
Now, someone just needs to put up some money (cough, cough NASA) and pair Winsun with the robot researchers at CCA, and let’s see what kind of Archigram fantasies we can realize. Researchers have made impressive progress, so let’s pour gas on the fire.
Image courtesy CCA
Image courtesy Caixin
Image courtesy Caixin