In a quest to find a new way of living, an entirely novel form of building was proposed by architecture firm Gramazio & Kohler. To demonstrate this method an installation was created at the FRAC Centre – a museum in Orleans, France that has a heavy focus on architecture, radical design, and historically ground-breaking construction.
The installation showcased a hands free building approach that relied solely on drones to transport and place individual bricks. Due to the limits on the loads the robots could carry these bricks were made of styrofoam, yet the construction remains impressive – with over 1,500 of the bricks placed entirely by the system produced by Raffaello D’Andrea. The algorithm transforms the drones into a cohesive building team, one by one creating a towering structure with acute precision.
The teams’ desire was to translate this small-scale model into a livable, workable “vertical village”, 600m high and with enough space for 30,000 people. The location was set to be in Meuse, France, an ideal rural area with an easy connection to Paris. However this pursuit of a unique self-sustaining habitat has not been continued past 2015.
A new post by Hanna Simpson, Diary of a Tile Addict, November 2019.
