The project was designed and implemented by students and professors from the Institute of Computational Design (ICD) and the Institute of Building Construction and Structural Design (ITKE). It is not the first time that these two divisions of the University of Stuttgart have implemented their developments in the form of a pavilion; in this case, they combined the advances in robotics and biomimetics in this form.
On the one hand, the design of the pavilion is based on the carefully studied structure of the chitinous exoskeleton of beetles, which consists of two layers connected by curvilinear rods-trabeculae, and even in one beetle in different parts of the exoskeleton its structure is different, and in different species it differs even more. During the work on the project, the Stuttgart experimenters collaborated with paleontologists and biologists from the University of Tübingen, and researchers from the Institute of Technology in Karlsruhe helped them to study in detail the "shell" of beetles using microcomputer tomography.
According to the authors of the project, chitin resembles in structure and properties artificial composite materials made of carbon fiber, therefore, this fiber in combination with glass fiber was chosen as a material for the construction of the pavilion. Robots-weavers were involved in the implementation: this way it was possible to avoid wasting material on molds for casting, which would have required a significant amount. The method of "textile production" made it possible to do without waste at all.
The modules from which the pavilion is assembled consist of a fiber-woven steel frame. With a total weight of 593 kg, the structure covers an area of 50 m2. In total, the development and implementation of the project took a year and a half.
