Andrew Wit speaking about his project Dinner4Six.
We’re feeling refreshed by spring break – ARCHtank is getting back into the swing of things! Here’s a recap of Andrew Wit’s StudioTALKS! event that we hosted at the end of January.
Who is he?
Andrew Wit is the co-founder of WITO*, Laboratory for Intelligent Environments. His work focuses on architectural technologies such as lightweight composites, digital production, and robotic systems. When he’s not doing research or architectural work, he teaches Digital Practice at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art.
He is co-editor of the book “Towards a Robotic Architecture,” associate editor for the Construction Robotics journal, and a member of the editorial board for the International Journal of Architectural Computing. He has received numerous awards on his research and projects, including the 2007 AIA Best of Practice Award and the 2007 IFAI Outstanding Achievement Award, and has worked for firms such as Atelier Bow-Wow and Toyo Ito. He received his M.Arch from MIT and his B.S. in Architecture from UTexas San Antonio.
Andrew Wit speaking about his approach to teaching studios.
One Day House – Adaptive Dwelling
Wit’s One Day House is an initiative that rethinks the conventional house by combining both his interests in digital robotic production and lightweight materials. In today’s rapidly shifting urban context, he sought to use modular reconfigurable units and intelligent systems to keep a house up to date on inhabitant needs. To make the structure lightweight, durable, reconfigurable, and low-waste, he used carbon fiber and ETFE as the main materials. (The latter is a strong, UV-resistant, self-cleaning plastic related to PTFE, or Teflon.) The carbon fiber is wound around hexagonal-based units that can be configured on site, making up the main structural system of the house. This winding process is efficiently executed by the roboWINDER, a tool Wit created specifically for this application. ETFE pillows are then applied as an insulating and weatherproof facade material. The pillow shape allows for real time air pressure adjustments to optimize properties for changing environmental conditions.
Clockwise from left: roboWINDER, roboWINDER carbon fiber test, computational model of ETFE pillows. Credit.
If you’re interested to learn how these ideas were developed, here is his conference paper on the One Day House, presented at the Association for Education and Research in Computer Aided Architectural Design Europe (ECAADE) in Vienna, Austria. Wit is currently experimenting with multi-layer carbon fiber networks as a more robust construction technique for more durable dwellings.
cloudMAGNET – Harvesting Water Vapor
1/4 scale prototype test flight in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Credit.
This was a cool project, if we may say so (pardon the pun). Wit and Rashida Ng, a PennDesign alumna also teaching at the Tyler School of Art, collaborated to design collapsible, transportable cloud kites that could cool atmospheric water vapor to condense into clouds. PCMs, or phase change materials, are embedded into the tunnel-like kites to compress and cool passing air. The project began with a demonstrative goal: the kites were to be deployed over Monteverde, Costa Rica to raise awareness of the disappearing natural cloud forests there. In the future, Wit is looking to adapt this technology for passive cooling and environmental control in buildings. Read about this project on his website here.
Collaborating with Robots
Artwork generated by Deep Dream. Credit.
Wit repeatedly emphasized the importance of robot-human collaboration, not just mechanization of tasks that humans could do on their own. So what does that look like? You could program sunlight sensors to guide a swarm of flying robotic panels to piece together shifting shapes for constant optimized shade as you walk. You could use Fologram (showreel) to combine augmented reality with Rhino and build/design complex models quickly at true scale. Artificial intelligence can even be a co-artist; Google’s Deep Dream melds the formal logics of user-inputted images to generate a new image, repeated iterations creating increasingly abstracted images. These are a beginning set of applications to keep in mind as robotics becomes increasingly present in the design field.
A Field of Possibilities
Wit mentioned a bunch of other inspiring individuals and firms that work with robotics, embedded sensor arrays, and/or human interaction. As a starting point to explore the immense possibilities of robotics applications in architecture, we’ve listed a few below.
Left to right: Philip Beesley’s Amatria, Material Dynamics Lab’s Soft Frits, and Immersive Kinematics’ Orpheus and Eurydice devices. Credits to each of the firms and research groups.
Simon Kim: a professor at PennDesign who runs the research group Immersive Kinematics. His work includes origami/kirigami-inspired reconfigurable architecture, robotic dancers, and performative devices for stage sets.
Mark Yim: a mechanical engineering professor at Penn who builds self-arranging robots to carry out an increasing variety of inputted tasks. Air vehicles and self-constructing robots make up a good portion of his work at the ModLab research group.
Philip Beesley: an artist with an eponymous architecture firm that works in responsive facades and lightweight arrays with embedded systems. The firm creates delicately intricate responsive installations often suspended to form living canopies.
Martina Decker: an assistant architecture professor at NJIT who works with smart materials and nanomaterials in architecture. Check out her project Soft Frits, a system of shape-shifting, photovoltaic, self-illuminating window frits created at the Material Dynamics Lab.
Neri Oxman: an architect, designer, artist, and professor at MIT that has created, among other things, 3D printed wearable skins for future space travel. If you haven’t heard of her yet, we highly recommend taking a look through her work.
That’s all!
Thank you for reading, and for those of you who came out to the event, we hope you had a great time. Keep an eye out for our upcoming events on Facebook!