Harnessing Ancient Materials and AI for Sustainable Architecture
MSD-RAS students Ecem Karaduman, Zai Shi, and Toto Tan at the mid-review for the Material Agencies studio (Photo Eric Sucar)
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In the adrenaline-fueled rush of a set-up for their studio review, a team of students pursuing a Master of Science in Design with a concentration in Robotics and Autonomous Systems (MSD-RAS) assemble layer upon layer of ceramic bricks, securing them in place with a satisfying “clink.” And as the model got taller, the stakes got higher. The breakability of ceramic was not far from anybody’s mind.
Clay is one of the world’s oldest building materials: from adobe bricks to terracotta tiles, clay has been used to construct buildings for millennia. Now, advances in computational design and robotic technology have revolutionized the way these bricks are made, and what forms they can take. Made by extruding layers of clay in carefully defined toolpaths, the students 3-D printed their designs using six-axis industrial robots, more easily found in a car manufacturing plant than a design school.
These fully-integrated and automated robots are housed just a floor below the Plaza Gallery in Meyerson Hall, in Weitzman’s Robotics Lab, which opened in 2019 as part of the Department of Architecture’s Advanced Research and Innovation Lab. They position the School at the forefront of architectural design research that leverages and develops approaches to robotic fabrication. The two-semester MSD-RAS program combines an education in robotics with the tools of artificial intelligence and automated systems, which hold the promise of thoroughly adaptive, sustainable, and intelligent approaches to manufacturing and design.
MSD-RAS student Ecem Karaduman, right, with Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture Mohammed Al Khayer at the Material Agencies studio's mid-review (Photo Eric Sucar)
“This is super exciting for me, because in the past we have only been able to design, and those are mostly preliminary design steps,” says Ecem Karaduman (MSD-RAS’24), who moved to Philadelphia from Turkey for the program. She says that in the last five years, artificial intelligence has unlocked the possibilities to actually produce such designs, and Weitzman is one of the few places in the world equipped with the manufacturing technology to do it.
Many in the profession believe the technology offers architects greater agency and influence than ever. “We are designers, we are developers, thinkers, makers, producers, and also innovators,” says Karaduman. “RAS is the most innovative area in the architectural field.”
The first assignment in the Fused Polyhedra studio was to use 3-D modeling software to recreate and print an existing model by late Philadelphia artist Robinson Fredenthal (1940-2009). Then, students split up into teams and expanded the geometries found in the Archives, exploring how the puzzle piece-like geometric bricks could be assembled into a multi-tiered structure. One team turned to internal male-female notches to stack the layers securely without mortar; another used the brick on top to lock the lower ones into place like a keystone.
This studio, Material Agencies, was the first of four half-semester modules designed to help students master the rudiments of computational design and robotic fabrication. “The idea is to try to get them up and running, give them a number of different kinds of problems and fabrication techniques,” says Associate Professor of Architecture Andrew Saunders, who led the studio.
The course drew upon the work of Robinson Fredenthal, who studied architecture at Penn. When the onset of Parkinson’s disease interrupted his architectural work, he turned to sculpture. His body of work, which spreads across the Philadelphia region and includes Black Forest on the Penn campus, expresses dynamic combinations of polyhedral geometry, specifically tetrahedra and octahedra composed of equilateral triangles.
Fredenthal’s papers, which are preserved in Penn’s Architectural Archives, represent a largely untapped source of inspiration for students of design. “I think his work deserves a nice monograph,” says Saunders. “But it's kind of a secret.” The collection includes cardboard study models that were made as geometric explorations in the artist’s studio.
MSD-RAS student Riddharth Jain presented his work with layered wood for the MSD-RAS studio led by Alicia Nahmad Vasquez. (Photo Robert Stuart-Smith)
These forms, which were originally only ever made out of paper or sheet metal at larger scales, were never intended to be made out of clay. And without robotic fabrication, says Saunders, it would be nearly impossible. Traditionally, pottery is modeled around polar geometry, because it’s thrown on a spinning wheel. These geometries sit on an edge and end on an edge, and are completely enclosed. But the new technique was surprisingly successful. The inherent 60-degree incline of the tetrahedral and octahedral shapes is the widest angle at which you can deposit clay, one layer on top of the last, without external supports.
Karaduman found that designing the structures using Rhino3D’s Grasshopper software was just the first part of the challenge. “Production with materials is completely different,” she says. The students worked with the clay through every step of the way: from kneading out the air bubbles (so the models wouldn’t blow out during 3D printing or deform in the kiln) and filling the canister to starting and stopping the robots at the first sign of instability. The emphasis on work that culminates in real, one-to-one scale prototypes is unique to the MSD-RAS degree, says the program’s director, Assistant Professor of Architecture Robert Stuart-Smith.
Traditional architectural pedagogy focuses primarily on geometry, he says, without necessarily taking into account the constraints of material or production processes. In industry, a project’s design is considered complete long before fabrication begins. When a design is finally received by the fabricators, unforeseen expenses of materials or construction methods can send architects back to the drawing board to pursue value-engineering exercises. “Separating creative activities from manufacturing ones is an endemic problem. But the more the architects know about the manufacturing processes, the less of a problem it is. Robotics introduces greater variability into manufacturing processes. Leveraging robotic production processes for creative means extends the designers ability to realize novel designs cost-effectively”
Materiality has been a key theme in the second half of the semester, when the cohort shifted gears to robotic fabrication using wood, in a studio led by Alicia Nahmad Vasquez. Wood, another ancient building material, has distinctive characteristics that students must work around. Teams explored different fabrication methods, including timber bending and pleating, but each group used a technique that Vasquez, a professor at the University of Calgary, calls “functionally grading” timber, creating layers of different species of wood.
“Normally, when you do a timber structure, you use one material, like pine or Douglas fir. But we are trying to make laminations that are heterogenous, where we use the best properties of each to get resilience.”
Stacking the layers of wood before milling is a more sustainable use of raw materials than carving into a monolithic chunk of wood, because you can start by building out the shape and then refine it using robotic milling technology, which wastes a lot less wood. This is another focus of the program: revisiting existing manufacturing methods and making them more intelligent and less wasteful.
Stuart-Smith sees the MSD-RAS program in relation to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, a historic shift in manufacturing that began in the last decade or so with the development of technology like artificial intelligence. One simple example of a semi-autonomous robot application, is a sanding robot, which adjusts its position in response to sensor-feedback to maintain a constant amount of pressure that it applies to to the part it is finishing.
Robert Stuart-Smith in the Robotics Lab at Meyerson Hall (Photo Eric Sucar)
“Most architecture is still built by Second Industrial Revolution technologies of mass production,” says Stuart-Smith. “where things are only economical if we make them all the same, and produce these same parts at high volumes of production. But with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, we have the capabilities of bespoke production at a scale or volume similar to mass production.” The goal, he says, is to put artisanship back into manufacturing, in a way that’s less expensive and more accessible than ever before, and less wasteful.
Next semester, each student in the program will develop a new robotic fabrication technique, in a thorough research-led design process that starts with students undertaking a literature review. The RAS program’s student-led research is already finding an audience among professionals. This fall, a number of recent MSD-RAS graduates presented their research in dynamic robotic slip-casting and die-cast extrusion ceramics at the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) conference in Denver. “They were very strong presentations,” says Stuart-Smith, “next to career academics and final year PhD students. Students who knew nothing about robotics two semesters ago, and they're contributing to the community of research at a really high level.”
“Since its founding, Penn has a history of having a critical and creative faculty doing novel work,” he continues. “And I think the RAS program is building on that legacy.”
