Fabrication & Material Aware Architecture: Ultra-Thin Formworks for Concrete

1. SUMMARY The construction sector consumes 40–50% of the world’s natural resources and generates 30% of its waste [1], [2], [3]. Concrete, which is consumed far more than any other construction material, has a particularly harmful impact. It uses significant raw material and has high embodied energy, and is alone responsible for 7% of global anthropogenic CO2 emissions [4], [5]. Reducing the amount of material used to construct architectural structures thus promises to play a major role in reducing the sector’s environmental impact [1], [6]. Recent examples, of material-rational structures, have demonstrated it is possible to reduce concrete consumption by 70% compared with current conventional building practices [7],[8],[9],[10],[11]. However, such radical material optimisations are rare due to added complexity of design and formwork, which can drive up cost by 80% over standard construction [12], [13], [14]. Digital Concrete [15] has recently emerged as a means to increase concrete’s geometric flexibility and applications while reducing formwork, waste and environmental impact. [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21]. The best-known is 3D Concrete Printing (3DCP). While this and other novel approaches pave the way to more efficient construction, the deployment of these new technologies requires processes that depart significantly from traditional construction techniques, and thus raise new regulatory and logistical hurdles [22].This Eccellenza Fellowship Grant will develop a Fabrication and Material-Aware Design tool to explore the design potential of architecture built with ultra-thin formwork that uses less material and formwork. This builds on her past work developing the novel Digital Casting Systems (DCS) [23] method, which exploits the properties of a fast-hardening concrete on-the-fly production. This significantly minimises the hydrostatic pressure in the formwork and allows designers to rethink how they shape reinforced concrete structures using standard and norm-compatible reinforcement. Not only does this offer a significant advantage over other novel processes, DSC has already proven a viable technique to produce structurally optimised concrete structures at building scale (Figure 3). Having developed these new technologies and processes, the applicant now feels it is imperative to enable their uptake into regular architectural practice.With this objective, the Eccellenza fellowship applicant seeks to establish her research at the Accademia di Architettura of Mendrisio (AAM-USI), which as a strong tradition in architectural design. More specifically, this will be done through an iterative design and fabrication method, where an interdisciplinary team will investigate the use of computational design to generate architectural structures that can be built with 1) Thin components (folded plate, canopies, shells) that can be robotically sprayed and 2) Volumetric components, (skeleton structures slab, column) that can be digitally cast. The components will be optimised in an iterative design process where physical prototypes will be produced and evaluated with sensors that provide feedback on performance. These codified data will be fed back into the computational design tool. The result will be a design tool and a series of physical prototypes that prove the design potential of Fabrication and Material-Aware Architecture (FMAA) using ultra-thin formworks for construction that consumes less material and generates less waste. Critically, this tool will provide a computational framework for a fabrication and material-agnostic design tool for complex material processes. Ultimately, the outcome will be to open the door to a much broader scope of research investigating different materials and processes that assures less material usage overall, thereby defining a new research field in which the applicant will occupy a leading position.