Buildings of the Future May Be Designed Autonomously by Algorithms

This spring, tech bloggers were abuzz over the new trend of 3D-printing houses, buildings, and maybe someday, skyscrapers and entire neighborhoods. Surely it's a concept worth buzzing about, but not because it's yet another thing that can be 3D-printed (after internal organs and rockets, it takes a lot to shock). Rather, because it paves the way for another emerging trend: digital fabrication—the marriage of design and construction.

Material printing is the yin to design’s yang, because it makes it possible to take wildly complex blueprints and render them directly into reality. Designers can break free of conventional ideas of what a room, a house, a city should look like. If you can dream it up, you can print it out, cheap and easy. It's enough to make futurists and architects quiver with anticipation, and now we're starting to see some of the results of the digital fabrication-enabled architectural wonders.

The most recent and stunning example was completed this week by two Swiss architects, Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger. It’s an intricately crafted 3D-printed room that’s designed entirely by algorithms, called "Digital Grotesque." The grotto is made up of some 260 million surfaces, in a design inspired by cell division, with "unseen levels of resolution and topological complexity,” the artists write on the project website.

To design the room, the architects simply programmed the basic shape of the space into a computer, and left it up to a series of mathematical formulas to do the rest. They call it computational architecture, and the technique lends itself to previously unchartered levels of elaborate design. "In computational design, the architect no longer develops form by pen on paper or by mouse in CAD program," they explain. "Forms can be designed with a complexity and richness that would be impossible to draw by hand."

If the Digital Grotesque project isn't a sign of what's to come, it's at least a promise of what’s possible: architecture crafted with minute textures, designed down to the millimeter. MIT Media Lab created a similarly futuristic structure this summer, called "Silk Pavilion.” It was a project out of the lab’s Meditated Matter program—the group researchers at the forefront of the digital fabrication trend.

With the goal of exploring the relationship between biological and digital fabrication, the structure was designed and printed partly by computers, partly by robots, and partly by silkworms. First, the design was inspired by the bugs: Researchers used 3D Motion tracking to observe silkworms building cocoons, and created an algorithm to translate the process into a digital model.

Then they used a 3D printer and robotic arm to build the initial structure based on this model, and let 6,500 silkworms loose to fill in the gaps, shooting out thread as they moved around. Neri Oxman, head of Mediated Matter, told Wired that "In more than one way, a silkworm is a sophisticated multi-material, multi-axis 3-D printer."

Technologists can take a cue from nature to help break through the current limitations of 3D printing building-sized objects. To fabricate something at that huge scale, the machine of course has to be bigger than the object it’s trying to create, so your average living room printer isn't going to cut it. To get around this, architects first tried using gigantic 3D printers. But a building-sized printer isn't the least bit practical, and so experts are experimenting with more innovative techniques.

Namely, robots. Robotic arms, robots on trucks, and swarms of tiny robots can extend a printer’s reach, to construct a large structure without having to print each part separately and assemble them together later (which is what the designers of Digital Grotesque did). The promise of 4D printing is also on the horizon. It uses responsive materials that can move themselves into place and self-assemble after they’re printed.

"Craft meets the machine in rapid fabrication," said Oxman, in a feature in Dezeen magazine. "We can generate craft with the help of technology." As the printing technology advances, so will the creative potential of architecture, until maybe a house doesn’t look anything like a house.