[Applause] thank you very much for this fantastic introduction and for the invitation the plan is that in this presentation I will initially introduce um somehow the uh let's say the intellectual base from which we um start our work and then I will actually try to show how that has an immediate relevance um for our um more applied research by going through a number of researches research projects um that form the focus of four chapters that I will introduce in a second uh at the beginning um and especially also in relation to the name of the Institute it is still important to understand that um we refer to computation primarily as the kind of processing of of information and thus both sort of machinic processes that operate in the digital domain of the computer as well as material processes that operate in a much more complex domain of the physical can be considered computational and why one can obviously say that there is a clear bias towards machine computation in contemporary architecture design there have also been a number of Investigations into what we call material computation in the past what has quite rarely been explored though is the kind of territory where machine and material computation overlap and where they don't simply sort of coexist but sort of intensely interact in the design process which is basically the focus of our design research so in this way our work really tries to embrace um a particular contemporary condition of architecture and while one can probably argue that the separation between the process of design and making which have dominated architecture design thinking since the Renaissance are still largely intact one can already sense that a new understanding of the material architecture is beginning to arise where the material can be really rediscovered through the computational and this is in a way also the kind of topic of the talk because design as design computation no longer remains limited to the binary Realm of the digital can be really perceived as an intense interface um to the far more complex real of the physical world so this enables us as Sanford Quinton nicely puts it to use computation to engage aspects of the natural and material world whose logic had previously remained uncrossable because they are lodged at too great a remove from the modalities of the designer sense and intuition so I like to think of um computation as something that really expands the design space uh not only towards the processes um of design but also to other scales of intervention of the designer even down to this kind of design of the materials themselves and um this is sort of and a kind of overarching uh framework is interesting because it opens up the possibility to no longer conceive of material as a kind of passive receptor of predetermined or predesigned form but really as a kind of active generator of design and obviously this generative understanding of the material is not without Pres so for example um one could actually look at Joseph Alba's material studies that he conducted at the bow house in desau which established a president for the possible enrichment of design processes um through what he actually called material experimentation and it's also very interesting to note that alas rejected established processes of materialization based on professional craft knowledge because he claimed that they actually stiffle invention so instead he identified the material Behavior itself as the creative domain for de developing new modes of construction and Innovation and um it's obvious that his material studies were really conceived not as Scala models or representations of preconceived ideas but as temporary unfoldings of material behavior in space and time from which then design unfolds at the other end of the spectrum um um one could actually look at FR oto's extensive series of experiments that he conducted at his Institute at the University of stutgart because through what he called form Finding methods Auto investigated a vast number of different material systems in order to sort of study their capacity to physically compute form so I quite like to think of our work as trying to embrace both Albert's experimental approach of employing material as a driving force in an open-ended creative process and Autos scientific rigor in conducting design research but I think it's also important to say that we aim at instigating a critical shift in this thinking by situating that investigation within a contemporary context of design computation and new modes of digital fabrication and um as this is pursued as both a kind of Technical and also as an intellectual man um the work really tries to seek um also to trace the emergence of a novel material culture in architecture so we really try to think that what um uh the kind of modest contributes that we do do not only contribute on a technical level but they also um really change the way we think about um material as designers and also in kind of cultural terms so because of that I will now introduce the four main research focuses of um our work and of this presentation um which look at materiality materialization Material structure and ultimately material performance uh through a more through a small number of projects um in a relatively detailed manner because I think the work is really only understandable if you look at the things uh not in a kind of broad uh in a kind of broad overview but if you really engage with them a little bit deeper um what is also important to say that these projects are quite consciously using the format of the Pavilion as a vehicle for exploring um these kind of emerging material cultures um and the related Technologies um that become novel spatial and structural potentials um so with that I will start with the first field of research um that I would like to introduce which investigates how design computation really enables the integration of material behavior in the Genesis of architectural form structure and space and I think it's also interesting that this shows how such an approach allows for exploring new facets even of relatively common building materials such as wood in this example um W is obviously an interesting building material to start off with not only because we in Scandinavia but generally we have to basically admit um that there still is no other building material that can rival wood sort of environmental virtues so there's a kind of intrinsic uh let's say incentive in looking what is arguably the oldest construction material um however one also has to acknowledge that the intricacy of wood's internal material makeup which is ultimately or which is actually at the beginning grown as the functional tissue of a is completely neglected in today's construction practice and Timber is quite literally dumped down to yet another dimensional building element which obviously particularly in the US is not even called Wood anymore but simply 2 by two 2x4 and so on which is quite emblematic for this disregard of what is the actual material so in contrast to that all our projects that investigate the possible integration of of design computation and materialization really begin with an investigation of the microscopic anatomy of the material and on that level it is revealed that in the various layers of the wood cells the um cellul the cellulosic microfibrils function like fibers that reinforce a matrix of liin and hemicellulose so one can really say that wood is a natural composite material and as such it also shares an number of properties with synthetic composites that we know such as glass fiber um as for example um the relatively low stiffness combined with relatively High structural capacity so if you look at po if you uh no pole vaulting the poles were actually used to be wood because they can be bent quite a lot so you have low stiffness but they're also structurally quite stable and they were replaced with ultimately a synthetic composite which is nowadays class fiber carbon fiber so as such these material characteristics are actually really well suited for construction techniques that employ the elasticity of wood to physically compute more complex forms and this was really um investigated as part of the first research project that I would like to show um it's very difficult to see but um in anyways this was the first um research Pavilion that we conducted or that we um did at the um sart university in 2010 which was a collaborative effort between my Institute and The Institute of um Yan knippers who is a structure engineer and um at the core of this project is really this awareness that the material has the ability to compute form and a good example of that is what you see here is a basic strip of plywood and then you in input a very s you give sort of introduce a simple input into the system which is just a force that pulls this support point in that direction and then the material computes this parabolic um curve curve shape which is actually the Elastica curve so what is interesting to note that um this um material Behavior cannot only sort of lead from a simple planer element to a more complex curvature but it can also enhance the structure performance of the piece nevertheless it is hardly ever used in architecture um and that is because Architects can usually simply not draw or model material Behavior which means that they can usually not design with it um so there are really only a very few examples of elastically bent architectures such as the vernacular architecture of the Madan people in southern Iraq that you see here that construct their houses from elastically bent pre-stressed Reed bundles or the timber GD shells um developed by froto in the 1970s um that are initially assembled as regular and actually planer um lses and then once they are checked up at a couple of strategic points they actually automatically form um the structurally stable double curved forms based on the elastic behavior on the wooden element ments so following a conversation we had with froto our project really aimed to further develop this kind of uh lineage of bending active structures within the context of today's Technologies starting with a relatively simple series of correlated physical and computational tests and from them we derived um a very basic system that actually consists of um two trips that uh are initially sort of where one bearing point is translated and then they are connected but the distance of the connection is um uneven between the two two strips which means that the reselling system has one strip segment that is in tension and holds the bend segment in shape so it's a kind of self equilibrating system um this is what we call a kind of Behavioral model of the material system and that needs to be transferred into a constructional model um which in this case is based on the constraints of and affordances of the robotic fabrication environment I will talk about that a little bit more in the next project um obviously there's one critical point um and this is where the strips are connected and you don't need to be a structal engineer to understand that he has a serious weak spot because this is where the structural depth of the system the effective structural depth of the system is almost zero and um this Pro this actually uh is quite a um a kind of problem if you just look at the the kind of Arc in isolation however if we look at the whole system we found a way to distribute this local weak spot in the overall system in such a way that it doesn't actually compromise the global stability so by letting these points oscillate around the shape of the Pavilion you actually avoid any longer sort of exis of weakness to occur so this became one of the the kind of distribution of the joint points and their morphological consequences became one of the main drivers in the computational design process so that strategically introducing irregularity here really allows to achieve global stability um this was complemented with a material simulation that you can see here um where you can see how the Pavilion kind of Finds Its final shape as the equilibrium state of all these kind of interacting elastic elements so I think one can nicely see in the simulation that um the behavior of the employed material really computes the pent shape obviously the kind of structurally required irregularity then results in uh a vast number of differentiated Parts in this case more than 500 um which is not a sort of problem if you can feed that directly to the robot and uh by far more interesting is that um in contrast to the substantial intellectual investment in developing the design computation processes um the actually fairly Advanced simulation tools um that the Institute of young knippers uh developed for for this system the final actual material system is surprisingly straightforward basically this the this kind of planer strips um arrive on site and they they simply need to be connected no special tools nothing is required and they by themsel find their final shape so in other words even in full scale on site the material computes the shape of the Pavilion and this equilibrium state of all the interacting forces unfolds quite a unique architectural space while at the same time being extremely efficient with the employed material resources so in fact the entire structure which had a diameter of more than 12 MERS could be constructed using birge plywood with a thickness of only 6.5 mm um and this very very delicate skin is at the same time the loadbearing structure which actually in all the cases of our research Pavilion need to fulfill the quite stringent um regulations of a German building application we need to get a building application for all these structures including all the loadbearing verification snow loads wind loads Etc um and this this is what this very thin skin does and at the same time it's obviously also the Light modulating and um weather protecting envelope which in this case touches the ground topography on one side and on the other side it forms a kind of 8 m wide um free spinning opening so what is also interesting um from an architecture point of view is that this toroidal space that is formed inside can never be perceived in its entirety which actually led to quite a surprising spatial depth that is further enhanced by this sequence of direct and indirect illumination which is the consequence of the kind of bending and tensile um regions of the strips so in addition of looking at these um Pence as a kind of architectural inquiry we also do a more scientific evaluation of the process um which in this case was done by um uh comparing these four models this is the architectural um model that results from the design computation is about 6 and a half thousand lines of code that derived that this is the actual materal material simulation this is the robot control model and this is um the most important uh aspect in this case which is a fully comprehensive 3D skin of the Pavilion as buil on side so um with the institute for engineering geodesy we scan these Pavilion and that allows us to extract the critical measure points and overlap them with the kind of geometry as planned and in this case this showed really only very minor deviations so comparing the results of the generative computation design process which you can see as the Digital model over here um with the scan of the geometry that the material Behavior computed on side which is actually this laser scan um really indicates that the suggested in integration of material behavior and design computation is no longer a kind of idealized goal but it's actually really a feasible proposition more importantly I think the project shows how focusing the computation design process on material Behavior rather than geometric shape really allows for unfolding performative capacity and material resourcefulness while at the same time expanding the design space of the architect towards forly unexplored spatial possibilities so I think here one can really say that the material no longer remains a passive receptor of shape but really becomes an active generator of the design so with that I uh I will move on to the second chapter which um looks uh not at the material Behavior primarily but at the kind of processes of materialization which is obviously a major shift that we're experiencing at the moment um that the way we actually materialize in architecture has be has really become or is is going to be very different as it used to be in the 20th century so um obviously there's no question that uh numerically controlled processes already had a major effect on architecture design um but especially with the recent shift from more kind of process process specific machines to the kind of generic construction robots the pertinent question in our research is how we can go beyond the current use of digital fabrication which either leads to quite an exuberant exploration of free from architecture or simply a higher level of automation of Building Construction so in contrast to these two approaches we are interested in capturing the specific affordances and constraints that are inherent to digital fabrication environments so that they can become the Point of Departure for an architectural um design research and for that we have investigated the transfer of um the mathematical concept of morphospaces from theoretical morphology and biology um to computation design and Fabrication in order to have a kind of robust method that one can actually employ in the design process so it's interesting that already in the early 1960s the paleontologist David R published quite a seminal paper in the journal science in which re he presented a series of computer generated shell forms that you can see on the left side here and then by using the three critical parameters that he employed to sort of generate these forms as the coordinate axis of a cartisian coordinate system he was able to construct what is called the theoretical morphos space so you can imagine the white space that you can see here is the space of all possible computable shell forms and then the critical step was that within this kind of space of what is geomet Al possible he mapped the uh the kind of um shell forms that actually occur in nature and by that he established a difference between the theoretical morphos space um of geometrically possible forms and the morphos space of forms that actually have been materialized so in today's theoretical morphology these kind of morphos spaces are no longer just three-dimensional but n-dimensional spaces that are really capable of mathematically describing not yet existent form so in the next research Pavilion which was again a collaborative undertaking of my Institute The Institute of young knippers and a number of other partners from our uh German competence Network biomedics and we researched the transfer of this concept from theoretical morphology to design computation and Fabrication and in a way this started with a very humble sort of I had a very humble beginning basically looking at traditional finger joints wood finger joints that you know from Craft um how they can actually be extended um through robotic fabrication um which makes it possible to join these kind of um blades in various different angles and even with different thicknesses resulting in quite complex blade structures that still maintain the traditional finger joints key advantage of not requiring any additional mechanical fastness or adhesives So based on the specific 7 AIS robot of our sort of fabrication environment um we identified the three critical morphological parameters of such finger-jointed plates and um sort of by using on developing a kind of robot robot simulation we were able to identify their sort of min max ranges and if you map them into to what we have termed the kind of machinic morphos space you can actually differentiate the space that is sort of this the the design space of the geometrically possible and the space of what is actually possible to produce with your machine so this is what you can actually produce as a kind of solution space um visualization with a six-axis robot and this is what you can produce with a 7 AIS robot in short now you know what kind of plate methologies you can actually produce uh which raises the question what are the ones that are interesting so with that um I think the the the quote by Julian Winston is interesting who stated that in biology materials is expensive and that means metabolically expensive expensive in terms of energy but shape is cheap as of today the opposite was true in the case of Technology now arguably with a kind of good understanding of what is actually uh fabricable um with the kind of digital fabrication setup this is beginning to change and because of that we think that biomedic design strategies are extremely interesting because you may figure that um biological Construction principles are more useful as a precedent than a lot of the things that we see in building construction currently for that you obviously have to understand again the behavior of the system and um it's not difficult to understand that these plates are are very good in withstanding inlan sheer forces at the edges so if there are forces that try to do that these plates withstand that very good um they're very weak in withstanding bending forces and they have no capacity to actually withstand any tensile forces and that proves to be a considerable challenge if you want to build a plate structure on a kind of architectural scale however um there are uh natural systems that have evolved ways of successfully addressing exactly that challenge so here you see the Sand Dollar which is a kind of specific C urgent and that centola has a plate skeleton which actually consists out of discrete polygonal plates and these plates are jointed or connected by stereum projections which are basically the biological equivalent to finger joints so that means that obviously the sentol has developed blade morphology that capitalize on the finger joint structure capacity by evolving shell forms that transfer all the forces that are acting on them and these are consider considerable forces because they live in the shore phase um and transfer them into sheer forces at the edges so with um the biologist of the University of tubing we investigated or sort of identified the eight critical principles that govern this um performative capacity of of the centar blade skeleton and embedded them as rules in a computation design process that enables designer to explore the machinic moros space of the physically producible through the filter of the biomatic rules which in concert with other spatial and contextual criteria leads to um a highly specific plate morphology so the resultant phological differentiation leads to a high structure performance which was again verified through these simulations um but in return also means that you again have a vast range of different elements in this case more than 850 different parts with more than 100,000 Different Finger joints however as the Logics of materialization where a driver of the design process instead of a kind of post rationalization um the generation of the required fabrication data forms an integral part of that so that although we're working with this 7 AIS setup for which you don't get actually any standard piece of software to run the robot um we were able to feed the control code directly to the robot through a self uh a programed piece of um software from the design model so here you see how these plates are produced um the plate is already trimmed and then the robot cuts the finger joints in one go with this tool that was developed by an industrial partner it's a special tool because it does not only cut at the flanes at the flange or at the tip it cuts at the flange tip at the same time and with that you get actually tolerance of the finger joint is the Torance of the tool which is in the sub tens of a millimeter range so one plate takes about three or four minutes to be produced and then again um despite the kind of relatively huge intellectual investment in the design simulation and robot control processes you end up with a strikingly simple system which is basically just a puzzle um of Parts um that you can assemble into these lightweight modules it's a kind of self-correcting system it only fits if the final module geometry is precise in fact so precise that we assembled the shell in a very unorthodox manner from the bottom up not a good idea um because if your last piece doesn't fit you can start over um in that case it worked and that was also again verified um by a comparison between the geometry as planned the geometry as built as the laser scan and this is the deviation mapping of the tolerances which again was in uh uh kind of in a millimeter range more importantly the resulting lightweight modular wood shell demonstrates on both the structure capacity and the architecture potential of a system that exclusively consists of extremely thin Birch PID plates that are connected only by these robotically fabricated finger joints so as the structure performance here results from each element's specific morphological response the entire Pavilion with a diameter of more than 12 M could actually built using only super thin plywood plates again in fact all the plates without any exception are here again 6.5 mm which means that you have a very materially efficient structure that encloses 200 cubic meters of space using less than 2 cubic meters of wood so the entire thing could be built with a stack of wood is basically the size of the this pedestal at the same time the system provides a tectonic richness and architecture capacity that overcomes the typically quite hermatic character of shell structures um offering quite a unique spatial experience that was further enhanced by the indirect illumination of the double layered elements in this zone so here this is actually the truly internal space which has a doubled layered skin that needs this perforation not only for the illumination but also because you need to connect the modules and then here you basically walk into the kind of um double layer by pulling these two skins apart and here the kind of constructional logic becomes um more directly tangible um I think overall this project shows how embedding the Logics of materialization in the computation design process enables designer to engage in a multidisciplinary approach that Bridges between the cultural as well as the technical dimensions of material and the rich repertoire of material organization in nature and it may also be interesting to mention that we have uh as a kind of followup of this project received the research funding for building uh researching and constructing a much bigger and actually permanent um building which is a kind of fully enclosed um prototype building um which allowed us to explore a number of aspects further first we were able to bridge the gap between academic research and a construction industry as within the kind of research partnership we managed to equip an actual professional Timber manufacturer with the robot technology basically providing him with this robotic fabrication setup so that this building can really be kind of the process as well as building can be um executed in the actual sort of context of Building Construction um and we reduced the initi doubl layered system to a single layer of beach plywood as you can see here um where the size is now grown a little bit to 50 mm but it's still the same principle of robotically fabricated finger joints so initially used the very fast and um efficient process of a a CNC speed panel cutter that preformat the plates the offcut of this process is reused as the flooring for the Pavilion so there's zero interior waste in this Pro in this project and then the plates are actually trimmed to this um highly accurate um finger joints and the pilot holes are drilled for the crossbolt connections that are still required for um tensile forces nevertheless the resulting highly precise um kind of segmented shell uh is uh still defined or the the kind of critical morphological feature of the segmented shell is still the finger joint as all the kind of decisive forces are the inplane shear forces as you can see here eight times or nine times higher than the out of plane Shear forces and much higher than the tensile forces so this is still what enables um the building or this kind of particular segmented shell structure um as mentioned the shell is also equipped with um all the additional layers that you need for a a uh permanent building so we have the 50 mm Beach plywood it's also interesting to note that beach plywood is a wood is a hard wood that is usually not deemed suitable for construction because it warps quite a bit um because of the kind of tangental swelling um we can use it in this case because it is um sort of the Finger Joint stabilize it the mechanical properties of beach plywood are much better than any softwood um actually kind of specific capacity is better than steel in relation to the weight um then we have um the an insulation layer which is actually also wood fiber and we have um the kind of waterproofing and on top we have a cladding and all the wood that is actually on the building is prod grown produced and machined within a 200 km radius um obviously for us the most most interesting part was um the kind of integration of again the design Spa the the kind of machinic moros space into a design model um so what we have done here is extended our previous approach towards an agent system so all the plates are actually agents and their behavior is actually defined by the fabrication constraints so the plates actually settle into a configuration and the interesting thing about this model is that the the model Remains live so you can always amend it in the design process and the blades find the machinable configurations um the challenging bit is that you don't do that for your only for your classical sort of synclastic Dome shape but you go to the settle shape anticlastic and you go back to the dome which provides a kind of genuine challenge if you're interested into geometry if you want to do that with planer plates so that obious also is the interesting feature that you have the polygons that you go from convex polygons to concave polygons and back which um then leads to this uh design to this space where the the the what you actually will perceive ultimately within the building is the loadbearing Skin So currently this is onite um you can see that for the construction you still need a kind of temporary SC fold but um the load bearing system is this um 50 mm thick um Beach plywood panels that are basically uh no longer a kind of puzzle for boys now it's a puzzle for men so um here you get an impression of that uh I always get worried if the people sort of walk over that but it's engineered for a couple of tons of snow Lo um on top of the beach plywood there this water the insulation waterproofing and this is just before the fitting of the final layer which is actually the um the panels that cover it and then the facade is installed still on the inside the kind of actual structure remains um sort of uh uh visible and tangible so I think again this quite nicely shows like this interior shot here which doesn't really work in black and white but I think the the interior shows how I think such an approach to design computation somehow nicely uh suggests an alternative to the perceived um conflict between let's say structural and material performance on the one hand and Architectural performativity on the other I think here this um suggests a kind of convergence of sort of performance and PO performativity on a different note it's also interesting to see that um both the scent dollar and our wood shell is uh remain relatively conventional when it comes to Common Logics of Building Construction it's basically building up a larger system from a small from a kit of smaller parts so um in the third research chapter that I will introduce um we looking at um how in biology um material structures actually actually uh P can be sort of thought of in a very different way their materiality is really constructed as composite of continuous elements that are organized across multiple scales of hierarchy um which is the focus of this chapter so it's interesting to note that um almost all biological structures or loadbearing biological structures are actually fibrous Composites but biology makes use of only remarkably few materials I mean given the sheer diversity of biological systems that we know it may come as a bit of a surprise that there are only four different fibers uh or fibrous materials in nature cellulos and plants collagen in animals kiteen in insects and Crustaceans and silks and spiders and um as George jery just nicely puts it um these basic materials are not successful because of what they are because if you look at them they actually have quite poor mechanical properties but they are so successful because of the way they're put together in biology so the astounding functional integration performative capacity and material resourcefulness of these natural composite systems is mainly a result of morphological differentiation which is the summary process of each element's highly specific response and adaptation to its environmental influences and forces and the next project which I will show which again was a kind of collaborative undertaking of knippers Institute my Institute um the biologist from the University of tubing this time also integrating um process and textile Engineers from the ITV dorf and really looked at how we can transfer some of those principles into architecture through the fances of um robotic fabrication and an interesting example of such structures is for example the exoskeleton of the American lobster so if you ever had a lobster meal you may have realized that different parts of the lobster shell have actually quite different material Behavior so for example The Crusher and the pincher claws are extremely stiff while parts of the tail segment are actually very soft and elastic um as shown in this engineering diagram of your lobster dinner experience so you can see that um they're really very different sort of material behaviors or material properties within this exoskeleton but despite these very different properties the entire shell is actually made from one material only which in this case is a natural composite of hierarchically structured kiteen fibers that are embedded in a protein matrix but um the buildup on orientation of these micro structures results in these kind of very different material characteristics a kind of principle that is very much unknown in sort of architecture so what we Tred to do in collaboration with the biologist is to carefully investigate different parts of the lobster um under the microscope obviously to identify the different fibrous organizations that drive these behaviors which basically means that you extend your design space towards the arrange M of the material itself so um here you see for example the strongly parall fibers um in kind of Highly loaded areas or there are also parts of the shell where the main purpose is to actually differentiate between the inside of the body and the outside which have more what is called helicoidal fibrous arrangement in biology now because these natural fiber Composites have a certain share a certain logic with um uh synthetic composites such as glass fiber or carbon fiber we looked at new production processes for these materials it's actually not so new this the 3D L technology from North sales um where every fiber is laid individually um um according to the force flow in this case um but obviously most of these processes are not really suitable for architecture because you first need to construct an elaborate mode mold before you can even think about your composite so we tried to develop a process of robotic filament winding in which we really reduce the mold to an absolutely minimal linear framework so that the first layer of um robotically laid glass fiber becomes the sort of embedded mold for the subsequent layers of the structural carbon fiber um so um once you have understood the Logics of how the robot movement disc case results in different material structures um and once you understand what the conse behavioral consequences of these Mis material structures is through the kind of testing of the um of the material and sort of also including the affordances of this actually fairly Limited filament winding process um we came to explore that along a kind of prototypical architectural design which is based on the same Al sort of on the biological principles investigated with the uh guys from tubing which means that in regions of unidirectional stresses like in the at towards the support pawns you have also this kind of Highly anisotropic um unidirectional fibrous Arrangement whereas in areas where you basically just just need to provide initially a foam workk for the carbon fiber and ultimately just the kind of building skin you have this helicoidal Arrangements in the same way as you find in the cuticle of the lobster so these principles were embedded in a comprehensive design method um which also included the simulation of the really quite complex interrelation between form materials structure and the behavior and the in the production process so you can imagine if you start winding with every kind of fiber you lay you change the form of what you have already produced and it really only settles into the final configuration at the very end and the decisive factor of that is the pre-stress which with with which you apply the fibers and in this case the the guys from um young knippers Institute actually simulated the entire production process um in order to understand what the kind of uh uh sort of here more Regional level the kind of material computation will be so the um production setup we develop for this process is um a kind of larger robot with a 4 meter arm um that is connected with the the robotically driven turntable and then a kind of temporary scaffold made from steel and this is the production process so that the the scaffold turn turns and while the scaffold turns the fibers are laid so here is obviously such a process radically differs from most other construction processes instead of an assembly of Parts here the entire structure is really wound as one continuous fibrous um system the fibers are laid wet as you can see and they're saturated with resin and then it only cures um after the next sort of layer is is applied so the curing time is about a day so um the resin saturated structure then slowly tries up so that um this temporary scaffold can be taken out and this resulting prototype really just forms one continuous structure so in this case the final shell consists of more than 60 miles of robotically laid carbon fiber but it's only 4 mm thick at its thickest part actually um which enables an astounding level of transparency and intricacy of the resulting surfaces particular when perceived from the inside so synthesizing the capability of the machine with the building up of the material structure itself um the transparent glass fiber surfaces and the black carbon fiber rowing really allow perceiving the logic of the differentiated material organization within this translucent envelope all forming one continuous L constructed materiality which similar to the Natural systems is characterized by a topological exactitude of fibrous organization rather than absolute geometric precision as you can nicely see here so I think here the construction Logics establish both uh kind of super thin highly performative skin on the one hand and on the other hand really a novel repertoire of architecture tectonics which in many ways sort of overcome the uh uh seeming exuberance of so many sort of digital designs so um one of the problems we faced with this Pavilion is that um transportability becomes a bit of an issue if you have a structure that is almost 10 m um has a diameter of only 10 Metter which means you face the kind of Buckminster Fuller problem that you can only transport it with a helicopter or a bunch of students in that case um which sort of prevents it from actually moving anywhere so we had to trash this Pavilion because we only get a halfe building permit for the for our side that um sort of made us investigate again how we could actually use the same principle of um Corless robotic winding but on a modular for a modular structure for that we investigated a different natural system which is the elyon which is this protective layer that um Beatles have above the actual flying wing so there's this very very delicate structure of the Flying Wing which disappears under this protective layer and um this can take a lot of forces because the the the the um the beetle crawls into recesses and walls and so on um in ground Beatles this shell is solid but in flying Beatles it's a very delicate double layered structure um so what we actually did is that we looked at uh a whole number of different flying Beatles and for that we collaborated with the institute for synchroton radiation at um the kit in ksro we were able to use the electron accelerator which has an quite an amazing orbit of 35 M to shoot at our Beatles which then allowed us to do a kind of microtomography of the beetle elytra from which you get actually a fully comprehensive 3D skin 3D scan so here you can see this is the kind of um 3D model of the beetle elytra which allows you to look at all the morphological features we did that for the six different Beatles And um we then sort of reconstructed it as a 3D model so here this is the kind of 3D model of the Beetle elytra and you can nicely see how if you cut through that um it changes from being a situation where you actually have a c lever and one end towards a situation where it's basically just a kind of a shell with two support points actually the shell was before and now you get the can Ling situation as you can see here so um what is also interesting is that if you zoom in a little bit um we can look at this critical feature where the two shell layers are actually connected and what what you can see here this is an electron microscope is that the fibers are actually going from the top shell to the bottom Shell at these kind of connecting um interfaces and this is really what makes the structure so versatile that you don't have the top layer and a bottom layer with sticks in between but you have a kind of continuous fire that goes from top to bottom and up again so based on our principle um we identified that we identified with the biologists we um use stem as a starting point for developing a kind of modular structure which is again based on sort of a class fiber that is wound with the robot onto which then the actual um structure carbon fiber eight and for that this time around we used a sort of setup with two collaborating robots so in the middle is actually a void and then this time you don't even have a scaffold but you actually wind the fibers into that void can be better seen here so here you already have the glass fibers in sort of wound into that void and then the carbon fibers are late in a kind of subsequent step according to the force flow on the particular modules so the entire structure was sort of analyzed and then the the carbon fibers actually is more or less differentiated according to the flow of forces so here you can see that process this time this time around the fiber emitter is actually uh static and then the robots move and this is the first layer of carbon fiber being applied to the um class fiber so it's really a kind of moldless um composition system that um is fabricated here does not come as a surprise that you have some that this results in something that is fairly lightweight um in fact the largest component is um 2.6 m in diameter but only weighs 23 kilog um so we're currently in the process of assembling the the the structure it's 36 six of those different um uh modules obviously the faces of the modules are uh not planer and we actually just in the process of putting the finishing touches on that and the pavion will open on the 10th of [Music] April with that I will not quickly Venture into the last um uh area of our research with has to do with material performance so what we really uh investigate is here is how um sort of design computation allows us to find new performes um even in such old materials as wood so um for that I will return for one last time to this material um looking at a number of studies that we have done over the last six or seven years um which have investigated how we can actually use wood as a kind of environmentally responsive building material and as most of you probably know wood is a hydroscopic material which means it maintains its moisture content in equilibrium with the surrounding relative humidity so it's really ecologically embedded in its environment and it adsorbs and desorbs water molecules depending on differential depending on the kind of differentials of the relative humidity and that then leads to changes of the Dimension so as you can see here the wood structure is differs um in the kind of T tangental um this is actually the tangental section and this is the radial section and um because they expand differentially um you get a kind of uh uh shrinking and swelling of the pieces of wood which is basically something that we usually experience as a serious disadvantage of this material so in fact we spend 70% of all the energy that we use in Wood processing on trying to avoid this from happening by actually kill drying the wood by that lowering the moisture content to a level where you have a relatively stable structure so in our project we were interested in doing somewhat exactly the opposite by exploring Woods sort of innate climate responsiveness um that is quite literally ingrained into the material itself and there's a a nice natural example that uses exactly the principle of a kind of liin based structure that transfers the dimensional change into a shape change which is the Spruce cone that as you probably know grows on the tree in a wet State and it falls off the tree by that time it's actually a dead plant organ so he has no input of metabolic energy required and if the surrounding environment reaches suitably try conditions it actually opens up due to the kind of differential shrinkage of the fiber structure so um what we have done is we transferred this principle of a kind of shape change um triggered by a dimensional change um developing a um a kind of veneer composite element that shows a similar Behavior so here you can see the that um the hygrometer shows the changes in relative humidity and you can see how this very simple strip of plywood composite um changes its shape accordingly um now we also uh after having researched at a while we are able to program the material Behavior so here you see the two samples have exactly the same material exactly the same material structure yet they respond in exactly the oppos opposite manner to the same environmental input and this differentiation can actually happen or the programming of the material can actually happen during the fabrication process so we have tested that in a number of um fullscale mockups and um done a lot of laboratory tests uh we have a a long-term test now for almost three years um and it's interesting that we monitor the system every 15 minutes but but until now it has performed absolutely faultlessly so to say every time sun comes out R humidity goes down it opens and when rain approaches relatively humidity always goes up it's kind of a natural law um the system closes at the same time we have also investigated ways of um achieving more complex movements and we have actually developed um an algorithmic process that uh is based on the anatomy of the specific pieces to be used and transfers transfers that into a kind of more complex morphology and we were lucky enough to actually test that in the context of a commission that we got for actually producing an installation for the permanent collection of the SRO pomu in Paris which is the um hyroscope the Metro sensitive morphology and obviously in many ways the S Pomo embodies somehow the architectural opposite to our approach in fact the entire building celebrates the very technology that maintains a stable interior climate as one of its key environmental features so if that would be color you would know that all the blue pipes for example are just the air conditioning and loads of these pipes are actually blue so because of that um the concept for our installation was to insert into this space of the pompo which arguably is one of the most stable interior climat in the world a kind of little class box on the first floor where the installation is actually situated in which we reproduce the Dynamics of the external environment so situated within this class case the specific system mology is actually computation derived based on on the one hand the system intrinsic material variables and on the other the heterogeneous distribution of the humidity levels um that even occur in such a controlled environment as this glass box so here you can see a simulation that was done by trans solar who um were our project partners for this and it's very difficult to see but um even within this kind of fully controlled environment you get a kind of very heterogeneous distribution of the humidity levels and the design actually responds to that by for by having actually two kinetic zones that either have flap-like movements or these kind of pyramidal shapes in con areas of concentration of humidity so we produced um the entire thing inous um including the climate responsive pieces which is a bit of kind of challenging task because you have to monitor the relative humidity not only during production but also during transport and even during storage and um So within the glass case as mentioned the climate corresponds to an accelerated database of the relative humidity changes in Paris to which the system continuously responds providing a kind of visual experience of the subtle humidity fluctuations that form part of our everyday life but usually completely Escape our spatial perception so a mere increase in relative humidity triggers the system to open and although there really are only these very simple veneer composite elements this system embodies the capacity to sense to actuate and to respond with no need for any additional mechanical or electronic equipment or even the supply of external energy so one can actually really say that here the material itself is the machine [Music] [Music] [Music] in [Music] so more recently we um received a commission for a pavilion for the permanent collection of the fra Center in oron which allowed us to sort of transfer that EXP experiment from the kind of level of an installation to a small building um which actually in this case operates in exactly the opposite way than the installation in the pompo here the kind of uh this kind of responsive skin remains fully closed at a high relative humidity level and once the the relative humidity level goes down it automatically actually opens so because of the quite strict requirements that entire Pavilion needed to fit into a kind of small oversea container we developed this kind of modular system that houses these um responsive apertures that gave us the chance to sort of synthesize the whole number of sort of approaches that we had experienced previously so this is the kind of here we use the same Principle as in this first Pavilion the bending active possibility of employing wood but we ch change it from a linear bending to a kind of conical bending so basically you have very simple actually very straightforward cheap plywood panels that have these uh puzzle joints and once you connect them they automatically settle into these kind of conical for shapes and then two of these conical shapes provide the skin for a h sandwich element with a kind of insulation core into which this aperture is placed so ultimately to ensure the Precision that's kind of uh um elastically deformed Skins are robotically trimmed so first um you actually scan the resultant component with the robot and then the kind of computation the the the robot control code is computationally updated to the actual geometry and then the edges are trimmed um with a plate and the form core is trimmed with a regular Mill with that um we again obviously sometimes we're also a Technical University so what we have to do is we cooperate this um uh uh design process by scanning um the resultant pieces um comparing the geometry that the elastic conical shapes found with the planted geometry or the simulated geometry in this case it was actually pretty astounding to see that the mean deviation across the entire surface is in a range of less than half a millimeter and you may actually see that there is hardly any deviation that is more than 2 mm across the entire piece which then is actually becomes a visible feature in the Pavilion because you see these kind of consistent gaps that become a kind of very prominent feature of the of this kind of modular um temporary Construction obviously the most striking feature are still the weather responsive apertures so on a sunny day these apertures are fully open but once the weather changes um and Rain approaches the surface closes entirely by itself and this kind of deep ecological embedding provides for quite a unique convergence of an environmental and spatial experience based on the absolutely silent and subtle movement of the translucent vineer elements um in these kind of [Music] apertures e [Music] [Music] thank you [Applause]