Rock Print is a 4m high installation currently being exhibited at the Chicago Cultural Center in Illinois, US, as part of the Chicago Architecture Biennial event.
The installation – a collaboration between the Gramazio Kohler Research team at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and the US-based Self-Assembly Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) – was constructed from loose aggregate supplied by Swiss company Misapor and recycled textile string.
The process involved using a 3D printer to lay down about 9km of string in a complex pattern guided by a specifically designed algorithm, and the manual addition of rock in layers. The rock was held together in the architectural design due to a principle called “jamming”.
“Jamming refers to aggregate granular materials, like gravel, that are quite literally crammed together in such a way that they hold their form and shape like a solid even though their molecular properties are closer, in terms of behaviour, to a liquid substance,” an ETH media statement explained.
According to ETH, the process involves zero waste and is fully reversible, which could arguably challenge current construction methods, given its use of robotic fabrication and inexpensive, sustainable and reconfigurable bulk materials.
Although ETH professor Matthias Kohler said the current commercially available 3D printing technology was “not yet suitable for the scale needed for architecture or its economic and structural demands”, he was optimistic about future developments.
“There is still a lot of interdisciplinary research needed to fully understand and leverage future digital fabrication principles at a full building scale,” he explained, “but after 10 intensive years of research in the field, I am positive that such new principles will not only lead to exciting architecture projects, but also to a new digital building culture – possibly to a socially relevant transformation of our built environment.”
Rock Print will be exhibited for the duration of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, which ends on 3 January, 2016.
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