Experimental pavilions are designed and implemented every year by faculty and students at the University of Stuttgart. Using their example, the authors demonstrate how this or that morphological phenomenon from the animal kingdom can be used for the needs of construction and architecture. At the same time, industrial robots become obligatory participants in production.
Last year, researchers presented two objects at once: in their home university, they exhibited a pavilion, the prototype of which
served as the shell of a sea urchin, and in the garden of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, they repeated, slightly modifying, their 2014 project - a structure resembling a beetle exoskeleton. In 2015, Stuttgart students and teachers used granular systems such as sand and gravel as a prototype: it was no longer biomimetic, but robots still participated in the work. This year, the team turned their attention to the "working ability" of a mining moth, namely two species of butterflies (Lyonetia clerkella and Leucoptera erythrinella), whose larvae weave "hammocks" from silk thread, stretched between two points of a concave leaf. As in previous years, the project was implemented by a group of architects, engineers and biologists. The process was led by Achim Menges of the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) and Jan Knippers, head of the Institute for Building Construction and Structural Design (ITKE).
For the manufacture of the pavilion, threads were used from
CFRP and fiberglass - lightweight materials (the whole structure with an area of 40 m2 weighs about a ton), but with high tensile strength. The construction took a total of 184 km of resin-impregnated fiber. It is worth noting that it was precisely due to the small mass of these materials that the designers managed to attract a drone to work: such low-power machines, as a rule, are not used in construction.
Since the pavilion was being assembled outside the university campus and had to be transported to the site, the structure turned out to be small, its creators complain. But the authors of the project emphasize that the proven technology is suitable for creating larger-scale objects. How the biomimetic structure was built and how it was delivered to the place of permanent residence can be seen in the video:
