This article was taken from the July 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
This web-like pavilion was inspired by a lobster and built by a robot. Architects and engineers at the University of Stuttgart's Institute of Computational Design, and at the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design, constructed the ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion to experiment with new materials and techniques based on biomimicry. They worked with biologists at the University of Tübingen to use the natural matrix of fibres in a lobster shell as a starting point for the building's design.
The ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion is 8m wide and tall enough to walk under, yet its walls are only around 4mm thick
The pavilion's walls are made of clear glass fibres and black carbon fibres; the flexible strands were coated in epoxy resin before being wound around a temporary scaffold, where they hardened. The team programmed a Kuka robot, similar to those used on car-assembly lines, to lay the fibres. A tool on the robot's 3.9-metre-long arm precisely positioned the material on the scaffold, which rotated on a turntable to build the pavilion.
"The exoskeleton is made up step by step, by laying on 60 kilometres of fibres," says Achim Menges, who led researchers at the ICD. He explains that only a robot could maintain the consistent stress on the material needed to create the curvature of the walls: "The robot is pulling the fibre with a constant force." Taking 120 hours to complete, the resulting structure is eight metres wide and weighs less than 320kg. Mimicking the lobster's fibre matrix improves the structure's load-bearing capacity while using a small amount of materials as compared to a more conventional structure. "Nature [uses the fibre matrix] because it's extremely resource-efficient."
Menges is now working on a similar pavilion, which will be larger, but made up of smaller components and therefore easier to transport.
