Architectural historian Spiro Kostof described architecture as “the material theater of human activity,” which makes renovating an actual performance space a daunting prospect (and possibly a meta-performance). Enter Ennead Architects, starring in the multi-year production of renovating New York’s Public Theatre. We asked writer Marc Kristal to survey the project’s latest stage.
“This space has always been about community,” says Patrick Willingham, executive director of The Public Theatre at Astor Place, the magisterial 19th-century Renaissance Revival building that, since the late 1960s, has served as a multi-stage venue for founding director Joseph Papp’s vision of a new and groundbreaking American theatre. Architecturally, at least, that has never been more the case: the capstone of nearly two decades of renovation/restoration work, to the tune of $42 million, by Ennead Architects (formerly Polshek Partnership), the recently completed revivification of the structure’s entry and lobby have dramatically expanded the Public’s public component–making the place that brought you (among countless theatrical high-water marks) Hair, A Chorus Line, and The Normal Heart a crowd-pleaser in every sense.
Though Papp’s intervention, in 1966, saved it from demolition, the building, at 425 Lafayette Street in Manhattan’s East Village, was hardly insignificant. Completed in three phases (by three architects) between 1853 and 1881, it was commissioned by John Jacob Astor and served as the city’s first free public library. In 1921, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society purchased the property and converted it into a shelter and all-purpose gathering place for newly arrived European Jews; the letters HIAS, in faded paint, are still visible on the northern elevation. Under Papp’s supervision, architect Giorgio Cavaglieri carved out five theatres of varying sizes and configurations, home to some of the great productions of the last half-century. But the communal spaces remained less than stellar: during the HIAS years, the original grand entry podium was lost, replaced by an interior stair that consumed 30 percent of the lobby. And subsequent to Papp’s original renovation, the structure received almost no upgrading until Ennead began substantive work in the mid-nineties.
Without, project architect Stephen Chu, along with design counsel James Polshek and management partner Duncan Hazard, restored the original auspicious sense of arrival with a three-sided grand stair, measuring seventeen by seventy feet and constructed from solid blocks of black granite, protected by a new glass canopy. In addition to extracting the steps from the lobby and enabling theatre patrons to enter at the original level of the three arched front doors, the new stoop serves as a welcome outdoor destination on a street previously lacking one, a magnetized urban gathering place akin to the monumental stairs in front of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue (though less imposing and more boho). continued…
News: the two temporary wing-like seating stands have been removed from Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre at the London 2012 Olympic Park, meaning the building can be seen for the first time as it was originally designed.
The two temporary stands increased spectator capacity from 2500 to 7500 during the Olympic games, but their removal will enable the building’s conversion to a public swimming pool, set to open in spring 2014.
The final two 172-tonne trusses were removed yesterday and huge panels of glazing will now be installed along the two side elevations, allowing natural light into the building’s three pools and corresponding with Zaha Hadid‘s original design. Once open, it will also offer a cafe, crèche and dry-dive training area.
The renovation forms part of the £292million legacy programme to convert the Olympic site into the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, which will open in phases beginning with North Park this July.
The Aquatics Centre could be used as a competition venue again if London wins its bid to host the 2014 FINA Diving Championships and the 2016 European Swimming Championships.
Photographer Edmund Sumner has revealed initial images of the filigree-clad Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations (MuCEM) by architect Rudy Ricciotti, which is set to open next month on Marseille’s waterfront (+ slideshow).
Tying in with the French city’s designation as European Capital of Culture 2013, MuCEM is one of several civic buildings set to open there this year and will be dedicated to the history and cultures of the Mediterranean region.
Ornamental concrete shrouds the glazed exterior of the museum like a lacy veil, moderating light through to the building’s two exhibition floors. Meanwhile, an inclined walkway bridges out from the roof the building to meet Fort Saint-Jean – a seventeenth-century stronghold that will also house museum exhibitions – before continuing on towards the Eglise Saint-Laurent church nearby.
Rudy Ricciotti describes the building as a “vertical casbah”, referring to its arrangement on the harbour. “Open to the sea, it draws a horizon where the two shores of the Mediterranean can meet,” he says.
Architectural sketches and motifs are etched across the concrete walls of the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin by Russian architecture collective SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov.
Architects Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov designed the building to house the collections of the Tchoban Foundation, which the architect founded in 2009 as an archive of architectural drawings from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Located on the site of a former brewery, the five-storey museum will be the foundation’s first address and comprises a stack of overlapping concrete volumes with a glass penthouse positioned on top.
Architectural reliefs cover all three of the yellowish-grey concrete facades and form repetitive patterns. The surfaces are also broken up into groups of gently angled planes, intended to mimic overlapping sheets of paper.
“This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the museum’s architectural look,” explain the architects.
The ground floor of the building accommodates an entrance hall, shop and library. The collections will be housed on the three middle floors and will only be accessible by appointment, while the the glass penthouse and roof terrace will function as an events space.
The Museum for Architectural Drawing is set to open in June and will present both a permanent drawing collection and loans from international collections.
Here’s a project description from SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov:
Museum for architectural drawings of the Tchoban Foundation
The Museum for Architectural Drawings is meant for placing and exposing the collections of the Tchoban Foundation founded in 2009 for the purpose of architectural graphics art popularisation as well as for interim exhibitions from different institutions including such famous as Sir John Soane’s Museum in London or École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.
For the construction of the Museum, the Foundation purchased a small lot on the territory of the former factory complex Pfefferberg, where the art-cluster is formed. Here are already located the famous architecture gallery AEDES, modern art gallery and artists’ workshops. The Architectural Graphics Museum that is being constructed will become a logical continuation to the development of the new cultural centre in a district Prenzlauer Berg that is very popular among Berlin residents.
The new Museum building will flank the firewall of the adjacent four-storey residential house. Such neighborhood and the location under the conditions of the current development implied the irregular space-planning arrangement of the Museum. The volume that is compact in terms of design rises up to the mark of the neighboring roof ridge, forming five blocks clearly cut in the building carcass and offset in relation to each other.
The upper block, made of glass, hang over the whole volume of the building in cantilever. The façades of the four lower blocks are made of concrete and its surfaces are covered with relief drawings with architectural motives, repeating on every level and overlapping each other as sheets of paper. This artistic touch is supposed to emphasise the function and contents of the exposition in the Museum’s architectural look.
On the first and third floors from the side of Christinenstrasse, the flat surfaces of the massive concrete walls alternate with large glass panes accentuating the building’s main entrance and a recreation room in front of one of the graphic cabinets. On the first floor there will be the entrance hall – library. Two cabinets for drawings exposition and archive are located on the upper floors. The levels are connected by an elevator and stairs.
Address: Christinenstraße 18a, 10119 Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg, Germany Customer: Tchoban Foundation. Museum for Architectural Drawing
Authors: Sergei Tchoban and Sergey Kuznetsov of SPEECH Tchoban & Kuznetsov, Moscow Planning and project management: nps tchoban voss GmbH & Co. KG, Berlin Architects: Philipp Bauer, Nadja Fedorova, Katja Fuks, Ulrike Graefenhain, Dirk Kollendt
Five wooden cabins fan out around a site on Tokyo Bay to form this capsule accommodation by Japanese office Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects.
Located on the east coast of the bay in Kyonan, the hostel was designed by Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects as five rectilinear wooden buildings with grey-painted exteriors and exposed timber interiors.
Three of the buildings accommodate guest facilities, including bathrooms, communal kitchen and dining areas, plus large Japanese-style rooms with tatami mats across the floor.
Compact bedrooms occupy the other two buildings and are stacked up on two storeys to make room for 12 in each block.
“All the rooms have a view of the Tokyo Bay, each one becoming a space like a ship’s cabin,” says Yasutaka Yoshimura Architects.
Each of the eleven-metre-long containers has a timber frame and follows the same dimensions as a shipping container. “The client requested guest units that had the possibility of future relocation or addition,” explain the architects.
A car park is positioned behind the buildings, but could provide space for three extra buildings in the future.
This private training center has 2 capsule-hotel and 3 tatami-style buildings. They are positioned with various angles of axis and all the rooms have a view of the Tokyo Bay, each one becoming a space like a ship’s cabin.
The client requested guest units that had the possibility of future relocation or addition. While clearing these requirements and in order to ensure the necessary dimension for the bedroom spaces with economy, we utilised a wooden structural frame on a standard freight-truck of adequate dimensions.
Location: Kyonan, Chiba, Japan Principal use: hostel Category: newly built Structure: steel, 1 storey Completion date: 2012
Site area: 1,013.22 sqm Building area: 149.85 sqm Total floor area: 149.85 sqm Structural engineer: ASA General contractor: Ajiro Koumuten
Spanish architecture studio Sol89 has converted a former slaughterhouse in the historic town of Medina-Sidonia into a school for training chefs (+ slideshow).
Constructed in the nineteenth century, the building previously featured a series of outdoor paddocks and a large courtyard, used for storing livestock before the slaughtering process. As part of the renovation, Sol89 has extended the building into these spaces to create kitchens and classrooms.
Like most of the town’s architecture, white-painted walls surrounded the perimeter of the slaughterhouse site and now enclose both the new and old sections of the building.
The original pitched roof is clad with traditional clay tiles, but the architects used modern flat ceramics to give a vibrant red to the asymmetric gables that make up the roof of the extension.
“If we observe Medina-Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation moulded by the topography of Medina,” explain architects María González and Juanjo López de la Cruz. “The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the moulded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place.”
The original arched doorway remains as the entrance to the school and leads in via the old structure. Inside, the architects have replaced the original flooring with exposed concrete that skirts around a set of historic columns in the main hall.
The kitchens are lined with tiles on the floors and walls. High level windows help to bring light in from above, while small glass courtyards are positioned at intervals to provide areas for students to grow vegetables and herbs.
Medina is a historic town in the hills in Cadiz. Its houses are known for their whitewashed walls and their ceramic roofs. The project involves adapting an ancient slaughterhouse, built in the XIX century, into a Professional Cooking School.
The ancient slaughterhouse was composed of a small construction around a courtyard and a high white wall that limits the plot. If you are going to act in the historic city you must adapting, taking shelter, settling in its empty spaces. The density of the architecture of the ancient slaughterhouse, where brick walls, stones and Phoenician columns coexist, contrasts with the empty space inside the plot, limited by the wall. The project proposes catching this space through a new ceramic roof that limits the new construction and consolidates the original building.
If we observe Medina Sidonia from a distance, it seems to be a unique ceramic creation molded by the topography of Medina. The Professional Cooking School uses this idea of the molded ceramic plane to draw its geometry. This roof lends unity to the built complex and interprets the traditional construction of the place, ceramic roofs and whitewashed walls. Some little courtyards are inserted, working as ventilation shaft, and are cultivated with different culinary plants which are used by the students to cook.
At the original building, ancient floors were replaced by slabs of concrete with wooden formwork that recognise traditional building forms, walls are covered with white and rough lime mortar which seeks material memory of its industrial past, and the existing Phoenician columns, displaced from the disappeared Temple of Hercules, have been consolidated. All of those materials, even the time, built this place.
Context sketch
Architects: María González y Juanjo López de la Cruz. Sol89 Team: George Smudge (architecture student), Jerónimo Arrebola (quantity surveyor), Alejandro Cabanas (structure), Insur JG (building services), Novoarididian SA y Rhodas SL (contractors)
London firm Tony Fretton has sandwiched two rows of brick houses between a pair of canals in the town of Den Helder in the Netherlands (+ slideshow).
Tony Fretton Architects collaborated with Dutch firm Geurst en Schulze Architecten to design 16 houses for the Molenplein site, as part of a wider masterplan by West 8 that centres around the redevelopment of the town’s former navy base.
Three-storey houses stretch along the front of the site, facing out across the dockyard, while a row of smaller two-storey residences run along behind and are separated by private gardens.
Drawing inspiration from canal houses of the early twentieth century, the houses feature a mixture of linear and gabled profiles, and present both exposed and painted brickwork facades.
Bright yellow doors and ornamental marble panels mark the entrances to each house, plus the windows come with chunky wooden frames.
Each of the 16 houses has one of four standard layouts. There are few internal partitions and finishes, as the architects wanted to give residents the opportunity to design their own interiors.
Read on for more information from Tony Fretton Architects:
Houses in Molenplein, Den Helder, the Netherlands
Tony Fretton Architects has completed a new development of houses in the Dutch town of Den Helder.
Commissioned by Dutch developer Proper-Stok the development comprises 2 and 3 storey houses designed by Tony Fretton Architects and Dutch practice Geurst en Schulze Architecten configured within a masterplan designed by West 8.
Molenplein occupies a long site between two canals, the Helderskanaal and Werfkanaal, where it looks out onto Den Helder’s former Napoleonic naval yard. The development is part of a regeneration strategy by the municipality to attract middle-income people to the area following the relocation of the Dutch navy base. The Napoleonic dockyard has also been redeveloped, providing places for business and culture.
West 8’s masterplan for Molenplein preserves the character, scale and diversity of the city fabric along each canal; the plan comprises large three-storey houses facing the dockyard and compact two-storey houses to the rear, with private gardens in between, and intersperses designs by Tony Fretton Architects with those of Geurst en Schulze Architecten.
Houses designed by Tony Fretton Architects are distinguished by a simple profile and generously proportioned windows and entrance doors. The designs are abstracted versions of typical canal front and back houses and aim to reproduce the generosity of scale and abstraction seen in Dutch architecture from the Golden Age and early Dutch modernism. Materials comprise wooden window frames in facades of white painted brick or rose coloured brick with white pointing. A measure of ornament is given through the use of discreet panels of Belgian marble at eye level. In contrast the Geurst en Schulze houses have finely elaborated detail and provide punctuation in the terrace.
Inspired by the openness and energy that the practice observed in an earlier development they designed – De Prinsendam in Overhoeks, Amsterdam – where owners radically personalised their interiors, the houses are presented with unplanned interiors and carefully positioned service risers, fenestration and staircases that support a wide range of possible internal configurations.
Location: Den Helder, The Netherlands Client: Proper-Stok Gross external area: 2,300 sq m approx Internal area: 3,200 sq m approx
Architects: Tony Fretton Architects Design team: Tony Fretton, James McKinney, David Owen, Chris Snow, Chris Neve Project Associate: David Owen Project Architect: Chris Snow Executive Architects: Geurst en Schulze Architecten Masterplan & landscaping: West 8 Structural Engineers: Ingenieursbureau Dijkhuis bv Services Engineers: Wolf Dikken adviseurs Main Contractor: Tuin Den Helder bv
You’ve heard the expression that [American] football is a game of inches. So, increasingly, is living in Manhattan.
This video of Luke Clark Tyler’s apartment (captured by Kirsten Dirksen’s Fair Companies) has racked up nearly two million hits, and for good reason: Tyler downsized from his previous 96-square-foot palace to shoehorn his life into a 78-square-foot studio. But what really makes this video distinct from other “tiny living” vids we’ve seen, and what should be of interest to the Core77 reader, is that Tyler is a trained architect who can design, build and install his own things, like his sideways Murphy Bed.
Also observe the little details, like how he’s using eyehooks as toothbrush- and razor-holders and how the bottle-stays on his shelves are just wooden dowels held in place by two carefully-placed sheetrock screws on either side.
This is giving us a potentially cruel idea for design education—but before we get to that, watch the vid:
Forward-thinking designers are using 3D printing to blow architecture wide open, as Dezeen’s editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs reports in this extract from Print Shift, our one-off publication dedicated to the developing technology.
The race to build the first 3D-printed house has begun. Teams of architects in London and Amsterdam are competing to produce the first habitable printed structure, using technology that could transform the way buildings are made. Though they all have the same objective, the teams are investigating very different materials and fabrication methods.
All these approaches are completely untried at this scale. And there’s a certain amount of scepticism regarding the viability of scaling up a technology that, until now, has only been used to make relatively small objects – objects that do not demand the structural or environmental performance of a house. But architects working in this area are convinced it won’t be long before additive manufacturing transforms their discipline.
“When we started our research, we were dealing in science fiction,” says Gilles Retsin of Softkill Design. “Everyone on the architecture scene was saying, ‘It’s only going to be possible in 50 or 60 years.’ But when we were sitting at the table in front of one of these 3D-printing companies, these guys were like, ‘Yeah, no problem – let’s start up the research, let’s push it.’ So it’s not actually that far off any more.”
Neri Oxman, architect and founder of the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab, argues that digital fabrication is ushering in a third era of construction technology. “Prior to the industrial revolution, hand-production methods were abundant,” she says. “Craft defined everything. The craftsman had an almost phenomenological knowledge of materials and intuited how to vary their properties according to their structural and environmental characteristics.”
But the coming of the industrial revolution saw the triumph of the machine over the hand. “The machine was used to standardise everything. And the things we built – our products, our buildings – were defined by these industrial standards.”
Now, however, digital technologies such as additive manufacturing allow craft and industry to merge. “Craft meets the machine in rapid fabrication,” says Oxman. “We can generate craft with the help of technology.”
The question is, which technologies are best suited to architecture? The results of the above architectural experiments will go some way towards answering that.
Landscape House based on Möbius strip by Universe Architecture
Universe Architecture is collaborating on its Landscape House with Italian robotics engineer Enrico Dini, inventor of an extremely large-format 3D printer that uses sand and a chemical binding agent to create a stone-like material. Dini’s machine, called D-Shape, is the largest 3D printer in the world. Located in a warehouse near Pisa, it looks like a stage-lighting rig and works like a laser-sintering machine, but with sand instead of nylon powder, and chemicals instead of a laser.
A moving horizontal gantry first deposits a 5mm substrate layer of sand mixed with magnesium oxide, then, via a row of nozzles, squirts chlorine onto the areas of sand that are to become solid. This resulting chemical reaction creates synthetic sandstone.
The gantry is then raised, another layer of sand is added and the process is repeated. When the D-Shape has completed its printing, the surplus sand is carefully removed to reveal the solid object underneath.
D-Shape prints at a rate of 5cm per hour over a 30-square-metre area, to a depth of up to two metres. Working flat-out, it can produce 30 cubic metres of building structure per week. Dini is a pioneer in the field and the only person to have already printed prototype structures at an architectural scale. In 2009 he worked with architect Andrea Morgante to print a three-metre-high pavilion resembling a giant egg with large holes in its surface. Fabricated in sections and then assembled, it was intended as a scale model of a 10-metre structure that was never built; nonetheless, it can stake a claim to being the first-ever printed architectural structure.
Egg-shaped structure printed by Enrico Dini
Dini worked with designer Marco Ferreri in 2010 to create the first dwelling to be printed in one piece. The resulting “house” – a one-room structure resembling a mountain hut – was printed for an exhibition at the Triennale in Milan. The crude building had a doorway and two square windows; its interior featured a work surface, sink and platform bed.
“It’s a very historical piece,” says Dini. “It was the first attempt to print a building.” Unfortunately, the brittle synthetic stone cracked during transportation, leading Dini to decide that fabricating buildings by section was a more viable use for his technology.
Printing buildings in one go will be possible in the future, says Dini, “but probably not with my technology.” Instead, he now sees a role for D-Shape in printing building elements like large façade panels, large diameter columns and double-curvature components.
Machines such as D-Shape could eventually be adapted to work on the move, Dini adds, allowing them to print on an urban scale. “We might print not only buildings, but entire urban sections,” he says.
For Universe Architecture’s Landscape House, Dini has devised a system that will see two D-Shape printers working side by side inside temporary structures close to the site. The D-Shapes will print a kit of parts that will be assembled to form the looping structure. Each part will be hollow; the superstructure will be filled with fibre-reinforced concrete to give it structural integrity.
“Before our Landscape House design, you could easily use the printer to print vertical columns,” says Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Universe Architecture, “but it was not possible to print something that has a horizontal connection, like a beam. By putting reinforced concrete within a hollow structure, you can have a vertical load on top of a horizontal structure. And that opens the door for all types of designs. It was Enrico Dini’s idea.”
Because of the fragility of the individual parts, they’ll have to be printed with support structures to prevent them from breaking while they’re manoeuvred into position; these will be removed after the concrete filling has been poured in. The entire process will take up to a year and cost around €5 million. Universe Architecture doesn’t yet have a client willing to put up that kind of money.
Some purists argue that this convoluted process is not “true” 3D-printing. “We actually don’t consider that a 3D-printed building,” says Softkill Design’s Gilles Retsin, “because they’re 3D-printing formwork, then pouring concrete into the form. So it’s not that the actual building is 3D-printed.”
For its Protohouse 2.0, Softkill Design plans to print the entire building using industrial laser-sintering machines normally used to make prototypes for the automobile industry.
“The existing research always focuses on transporting a 3D printer to the site because they’re using sand or concrete,” says Retsin. “We’re deliberately working in a factory and using laser-sintered bioplastic [plastics derived from biomass rather than hydrocarbons].”
ProtoHouse by Softkill Design
The design itself also bucks convention: instead of columns and floorplates, it has a fibrous structure akin to the trabecular composition of bone. Unlike sand-based structures, which require thick sections to maintain structural integrity, Retsin says these fibres can be as thin as 0.7mm.
This opens up all sorts of new aesthetic possibilities. Traditional steel or concrete structures have a high level of redundancy – material that doesn’t need to be there, but which is too difficult or expensive to remove. But 3D printing allows material to be placed only where it is required. “We created an algorithm that mimics bone growth, so that we’re depositing material only where it’s necessary and most structurally efficient,” says Softkill Design’s Aaron Silver. “It’s not a purely structural object; we’ve also tried to ‘design’ with it, to create our own forms.”
The single-storey house has a porous exoskeleton rather than a solid envelope. Weatherproofing would be applied inside, lining the cave-like living spaces. Voids would be glazed in the traditional manner.
The building will have a footprint of around 8 by 5 metres and will be laser-sintered in a factory, in pieces. These pieces, each up to 2.5 metres, will be transported by van to the site (although, like Universe Architecture, Softkill Design doesn’t have a specific site or client yet) and joined simply by pushing together the fibrous strands “like Velcro”. Softkill Design believes the pieces could all be printed in three weeks and assembled on site in a single day.
“The big difference between 3D printing and manufacturing on site is that you’re almost entirely skipping the fabrication part,” says Retsin. There are huge potential time, labour and transportation savings to be made, compared to traditional construction methods – however, the cost of 3D-printed materials is still far higher than regular bricks and blocks.
Canal house by DUS Architects
“The price of 3D printing is still a big problem for large volumes,” says Retsin. “You pay for the amount of material used rather than the volume. So we’ve developed a method that can generate a large volume with extremely thin and porous structures. It’s only now with 3D printing that you can achieve a strong, fibrous structure using less material than a normal structure. That makes it cheaper.”
For its canal house project, DUS Architects is using lower technology: a scaled-up Ultimaker desktop machine that it calls the KamerMaker (“room maker”) that can print components up to 3.5 metres high. Working initially in polypropylene, the architects hope to experiment with recycled plastics and bioplastics further into the build.
The project is not about exploring new architectural possibilities but rather generating discussion about the future of design and construction. Starting on site this summer, DUS intends to figure out the construction methodology as it goes along and hold workshops and open days in the structure as it is built. “3D printing is not going to replace brick and concrete buildings. I think it’s more going to be the case that we’ll start printing brick and concrete,” says architect Hedwig Heinsman of DUS. “This is something to kick-start a debate about where architects will be in the future.”
Over in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Mediated Matter group at MIT is researching a head-spinning array of innovative design and construction processes that integrate, as their website states, “computational form-finding strategies with biologically inspired fabrication”. Many of these involve looking at ways of developing 3D-printing technologies for architectural applications.
“The 3D-printing technology has been developing at a very rapid pace,” says Mediated Matter founder Neri Oxman, “but there are still many limitations,” such as the range of materials you can use, the maximum size you can print at and the speed of the process.
Oxman and her team are researching ways of getting around such drawbacks, for example experimenting with printers that can produce “functionally graded” materials that exhibit a range of different properties.
Existing 3D printers are only able to produce homogeneous materials that have the same properties throughout. But graded materials would be useful for printing architectural elements – such as beams or façades that mimic bone, which is hard on the outside but spongy on the inside. Or for printing human skin, which has differently sized pores on different parts of the body, allowing it to act as a filter on the face and a protective barrier on the back.
Oxman has developed a process to assign different materials or properties to individual voxels (volumetric pixels) produced on existing printers, creating simple graded materials. But gradients are hard to produce with the current generation of 3D printers, which rely on armatures or gantries that can only move on three axes – back and forward, side to side, and up and down – and which must lay down material in layers, one atop the other. They also require complex support structures to be printed at the same time to prevent the printed objects collapsing under their own weight.
“In traditional 3D printing, the gantry size poses an obvious limitation for the designer who wishes to print in larger scales and achieve structural and material complexity,” explains Oxman. She and her team are investigating ways of printing with additional axes of movement, by replacing the gantry with a six-axis robotic arm. “Once we place a 3D-printing head on a robotic arm, we free up these limitations almost instantly,” she says. This is because it allows “free-form” printing at a larger scale and without the need for support structures.
Electron microscope image of the surface of a silk moth cocoon. Image by Dr. James C. Weaver, Wyss Institute, Harvard University
Oxman and her team have been looking to the natural world for inspiration, studying the way in which silkworms build their cocoons. Silkworms “print” their pupal casings by moving their heads in a figure-of-eight pattern, depositing silk fibre and sericin matrix around themselves as they go. They’re able to vary the gradient of the printed material, making the cocoon soft on the inside and hard on the outside. As well as the silk fibre – which can be up to a kilometre in length – the pupae also excretes sericin, a sticky gum that bonds the fibres together to form the cocoon. Essentially, the silkworm is acting as a multi-axis 3D multi-material printer.
“We attached tiny magnets to a silkworm’s head,” says Oxman, “and we motion-tracked its movement as it built its cocoon. We then translated the data to a 3D printer connected to a robotic arm, which would allow us to examine the biological structure in a larger scale.”
Oxman’s team will perform its first large-scale experiment using this research in April, when it aims to print a pavilion-like structure, measuring 3.6 by 3.6 metres, using a robot programmed to act like a silkworm.
Robotic arms can be used to print in traditional materials, such as plastic, concrete or composites, or employed to weave or knit three-dimensional fibre structures. Researchers are also exploring how the high-performance fibres excreted by silkworms and spiders could be produced artificially, and Oxman’s team will print the pavilion’s structure using natural silk.
In the future, buildings may be constructed by swarms of tiny robots that use a combination of printing and weaving techniques, Oxman says. “I would argue that 3D printing is more than anything an approach for organising material,” she says, using the terms “4D printing”, “swarm construction” and “CNC weaving” to describe the future of architectural technology. “Today’s material limitations can be overcome by printing with responsive materials,” she says. “Gantry limitations can be overcome by printing with multiple interactive robot-printers. And process limitations can be overcome by moving from layering to weaving in 3D space, using a robotic arm.”
According to this vision, the construction site of the future will owe more to tiny creatures like silkworms than to ever-larger 3D printers of the type we use today. “Transcending the scale limitation by using larger gantries can only offer so much,” says Oxman. “But if we consider swarm construction, we are truly pushing building technology into the 21st century.”
News: Barcelona officials are outraged over plans to construct a 300-metre “space hotel” – complete with a zero-gravity spa and vertical wind tunnel – on an artificial island off the coast of the city.
Aimed at guests who “wish they could travel to distant galaxies”, the €1.5 billion hotel designed by Spanish architect Erik Morvan would offer over 2,000 hotel suites and residences alongside a 24-hour “space mall” and a marina filled with parks, pools and beaches. Windows would feature transparent glass displays of the galaxy, which guests could turn on and off at the touch of the button.
US developer Mobilona submitted a request for planning permission to Barcelona City Hall last week, but city mayor Xavier Trias has already voiced objections. “We have no intention of turning Barcelona into a spectacle,” he told Catalan news channel 3/24.
Describing the plans as “not in keeping” with his vision of the city, Trias commented: “We have no need or desire to take on projects of this nature. We are a city of culture, knowledge, of creativity, and of innovation, and our project [to develop the city] will follow a different path.”
A representative from the Barcelona planning department also told the Telegraph newspaper: “This seems more suitable for somewhere like Dubai. Any plan to advance Barcelona must be in keeping with the present model of the city.”
Mobilona’s CEO Jerome Bottari is confident that the space hotel concept will be popular and has already unveiled plans for similar projects in Hong Kong and Los Angeles. “Mobilona creates the perfect blend of design and technology to simulate any place on earth, or in the universe,” he said. “Immersive displays inside Mobilona Space Hotel on Barcelona Island will provide guests with stunning views of some of the most remote galaxies in our universe.”
If plans go ahead, the building will become the tallest hotel in Europe.
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“This space has always been about community,” says Patrick Willingham, executive director of The Public Theatre at Astor Place, the magisterial 19th-century Renaissance Revival building that, since the late 1960s, has served as a multi-stage venue for founding director Joseph Papp’s vision of a new and groundbreaking American theatre. Architecturally, at least, that has never been more the case: the capstone of nearly two decades of renovation/restoration work, to the tune of $42 million, by Ennead Architects (formerly Polshek Partnership), the recently completed revivification of the structure’s entry and lobby have dramatically expanded the Public’s public component–making the place that brought you (among countless theatrical high-water marks) Hair, A Chorus Line, and The Normal Heart a crowd-pleaser in every sense.
