Current and future digital modelling and fabrication methods advance opportunities for architects and designers to develop complex designs, organizations, and structures. While offering these shape-finding possibilities, design objectives are often conceptually distant from manufacturing targets. If singularity is a definitive objective of architectural design, repeating fundamental characteristics and criteria underwrites efficient production. Even with robotics slowly percolating the construction industry, the contrasting systemic postures of design and manufacturing still underscore certain fundamental snags between architecture and construction.
With robots programmed to cut, lift, nail, screw, or to execute any other task, architects are envisioning and exploring forms and geometries that are only possible through this computerized precision. For both design and simulating fabrication, miniature cobots can be brought into any office to validate this bespoke file to making approach. This one-off methodology is in sharp contrasts to how robots are used to optimize off-site construction to efficiently reduce both costs and schedules.
Autovol Volumetric Modular’s https://autovol.com use of automation in their factory symbolizes its potential to solve current labour shortages and construction’s lagging productivity. Once robots are programmed to perform a repetitive job, they can be part of a linear or cellular manufacturing process with people only keeping an eye on the machines and making sure materials, nails or screws are in position implementing their ordered tasks. Panelized elements like walls and floors can be fabricated on tables and then assembled into volumes or prisms that are easily stacked on site with robotic prompted precision.
A streamlined mass-production process is based on strict, consistent, and precise automation and dependent on clear standards for construction with the repetition of common design dimensions, geometry and criteria from project to project. Modular automation certainly offers opportunities for major gains in time versus conventional construction. Improvements are made through process replication and optimized by a continuous production loop. These patterns of production are poles apart from the one-off prototypes architects sometimes conceive. Even as robots integrate the construction industry, the conceptual distance between both fields can be bridged or widened according to the same age-old debate between customization and normalization.
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| Photo from the Autovol website |
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