Robotically assembled brickwork: Manipulating assembly processes of discrete elements

Today, the advance of digital technologies, both on the side of conceptualisation of architecture and on the side of its production, enable information penetration across the whole process of making – from design to fabrication. This opens up new ways of thinking about architectural design and materialisation. Within the large family of computer controlled fabrication machines, industrial robots are especially well suited to be adopted for construction work, mainly because of their ability to perform variable assembly tasks. Although, so far applying robotic technologies in construction has mainly been viewed from an industrial engineering perspective, geared towards increasing productivity through automation without a link to the potentials for architectural design. In the present work, potentials inherent in robotically controlled assembly processes are investigated from an architectural perspective, specifically focusing on the interrelation of design and fabrication. This is exemplified by the means of brickwork, which was chosen, because the relative small size of the single brick module and their generic geometry is well suited for a robotic assembly process. Further, the layering of bricks resembles one of the fundamental assembly processes in architecture and can easily be singled out as a well-defined subdomain of construction. The robotic-based assembly processes and their corresponding design criteria are investigated through several physical experiments. The experiments combine both the design and engineering of a robotic fabrication process and, consequently, the application of the fabrication process on a design task. The aim is to define techniques and methodologies for robotic-based assembly processes of brickwork, where the architectural design evolves into the interplay between conceptual intention and the engineering of a robotic process. The work is built on the hypothesis that the synchronisation of design and making can instigate novel design solutions for brickwork and is essential to leveraging new architectural potentials.