ETH robots build hanging gardens for Zug
At the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH), the boundaries of interactive architectural design and digital fabrication are currently being shifted: for the Tech Cluster Zug, four robotic arms are using artificial intelligence to build the 22.5-meter-high planted sculpture Semiramis.
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The Tech Cluster Zug will have hanging gardens based on ancient models. The planted architectural sculpture intended for this purpose bears the name Semiramis. It is 22.5 meters high and consists of five differently sized and geometrically complex wooden bowls that are placed one on top of the other. A video presented in a media release from ETH shows how these are supported by eight slender steel supports.
Researchers from the group of ETH architecture professors Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler design and create Semiramis together with Müller Illien landscape architects , the timber construction engineers from Timbatec and other partners from industry and research. The design options come from a machine learning algorithm that was developed in collaboration with the Swiss Data Science Center .
“The computer model enables us to reverse the conventional design process and to explore the entire scope for designing a project,” Matthias Kohler, Professor of Architecture and Fabrication at ETH Zurich, is quoted as saying. In the Immersive Design Lab , an ETH laboratory for augmented reality, the researchers were able to explore the designs in three dimensions. A software developed jointly with the Computational Robotics Lab at ETH allowed the designs to be modified. According to Kohler, this lighthouse project in architectural research is driving “key research topics such as interactive architectural design and digital fabrication”.
The Semiramis sculpture is currently being built by four cooperating robotic arms in the robotic production laboratory at ETH Zurich. An algorithm prevents collisions if you each lift one of the wooden panels and place them in the room at the same time. The robots relieve humans of the heavy lifting and precise positioning. They also make complex scaffolding unnecessary.
The individual shell segments each consist of 51 to 88 wooden panels. When one of them is ready, it is transported to Zug by truck. Semiramis is to be erected and planted in spring 2022.
