Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D’Andrea
FRAC Centre, Orléans, France
Concluding a talk in California a few years ago, the architects Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler issued a warning: in the early 1990s, 80 percent of architects insisted that they’d never need CAD (computer-aided design) software, with the result that the entire industry now uses CAD software it didn’t design, not because it’s good, but because it’s fast. And digital fabrication’s inevitability means this sad history will repeat itself unless architects stop their ostrich-like behaviour and connect with computer-driven construction forthwith.
‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ showcases Gramazio and Kohler’s latest engagement with this concern, which drives their architecture and their research (or, as they prefer, recherché, because it sounds less serious) at Zurich’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH). It is also arguably Gramazio and Kohler’s most startling exploration of these issues, even if it remains speculative for now. The idea is that large structures – here, a 600-metre-high vertical village – soon will be built by teams of computer-controlled, four-rotor helicopters called ‘quadrocopters’. Characteristically for Gramazio and Kohler, there’s nothing exotic about this project’s components: the timely delivery of prefabricated units; once-unimaginable computing power; the quadrocopters themselves. (Having first flown in the 1920s, these craft are widely available today as small drones.) What is new, and fascinating, about this exhibition is what happened when Gramazio and Kohler enlisted their colleague, Raffaello D’Andrea, professor of Dynamic Systems at ETH, to combine these components with an automated operating system that controls four quadrocopters at once.
On one level, this fascination is of the Popular Mechanics variety. The show focuses on four copters buzzing around the gallery to assemble an 18-metre-high model of the vertical village using ‘bricks’ representing prefab housing units, while a projection shows real-time visualization of how the ‘foreman’ operating programme sees things. As the craft grab the bricks, fly to their drop-off points, and return to their recharging bases, without crashing into either each other or the growing tower, it becomes clear that chaos would ensue if humans were in control. (For demonstrations of this manoeuvrability, see flyingmachinearena.org.)
However, a deeper interest supersedes this ‘gee whiz’ element, because Gramazio and Kohler don’t fetishize digital technology. Rather, their concept of ‘digital materiality’ (elaborated in their 2008 book Digital Materiality in Architecture) interrogates the interaction between construction and computers. For instance, can a computer’s processing power combine with a robot’s precision to make a familiar material do something new? In this way, ‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ develops from less ambitious (but realizable) projects, like brick walls (The Programmed Wall, 2006; Structural Oscillations, 2008) that are innovative not because of the materials – the bricks are just bricks – but because computers and robots helped to configure those walls in arrays that are visually compelling and, until now, structurally impossible.
But this latest innovation goes beyond building fancier walls. Combining recent and emerging technologies (high-efficiency solar panels, small-scale wind power generation, potable rain-water collection, smart materials) with developments that will be commercially available in five to ten years (ever more powerful computers, full-scale quadrocopters), ‘Flight Assembled Architecture’ imagines buildings that are more efficient, human-aware and visually intriguing than ever. But it also cautions that only a considerably amount of direction will ensure that we get there. Otherwise, we’ll just end up with more of the same junk we’ve already got, only cheaper – in every sense of the word.
Charles Reeve
