University of Stuttgart researchers have created what some say is the first permanent building to be significantly designed and built using robotics.
The team employed a robotic arm and custom software to build the 250-square-meter geodesic structure—a curvy shell composed of self-bracing panels—faster and with greater precision than could be accomplished with human hands alone. And they did so while minimizing the project's environmental impact.
The result is a sinuous building called Landesgartenschau, or LaGa, Exhibition Hall in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany. The hall is made out of 243 geometrically unique plates of 50-millimeter-thick beech plywood designed and cut using robotics. Humans then assembled the plates like puzzle pieces, fitting together 7,356 finger joints so that the resulting structure could stand without supports. "If you didn't have the design, engineering and fabrication technology we assembled, you simply wouldn't be able to build anything like this," says LaGa team leader Achim Menges. "Proportionally, the timber shell is much thinner than an eggshell," Menges notes. Whereas eggshells have a thickness-to-span ratio of 1 to 100, LaGa's ratio is more than 1 to 200.
This project marks the first time builders have employed robotics, which had been considered too inflexible for use in iconoclastic architecture, so extensively on a permanent building, says Johannes Baumann, co-founder of the Association for Robots in Architecture. In fact, automation was the enabling factor in LaGa’s eye-catching design as well as the speed and efficiency involved in assembling the structure.
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