Developing Concrete Polymer Building Components for 3D Printing (2011-10)¶

The creation of building components that can be seen as sustainable, inexpensive, stronger, recyclable, customizable and perhaps even reparable to the environment is an urgent, and critical focus of architectural research. In the U.S. alone, the construction industry produced 143.5 million tons of building-related construction and demolition debris in 2008, and buildings, in their consumption of energy produce more greenhouse gasses than automobiles or industry. Because the inherent nature of 3D printing opens new possibilities for shaping materials, the process will reshape the way we think about architectural building components. Digital materiality, a term coined by Italian and Swiss architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, describes materiality increasingly enriched with digital characteristics where data, material, programming and construction are interwoven (Gramazio and Kohler, 2008). The research aspires towards this classification through the use of parametric modeling tools, analytic software and quantitative and qualitative analysis. Rapid prototyping, which is the automatic construction of physical objects using additive manufacturing technology, typically employs materials intended for the immediate analysis of form, scale, and tactility. Rarely do the materials used in this process have any long-term value, nor does the process - except in rare cases with expensive metal prototyping - have the ability to create actual and sustainable working products. This research intends to alter this state of affairs by developing methods for 3D printing using concrete for the production of longlasting performance-based components.