Not availableIngy El-Darwish, Mohamed Goma

This paper investigates the thermal properties of 3D printed Cob, a monolithic earth construction technique based on robotically extruded subsoil and locally available organic fibres. The relevance of 3D printed earthen construction materials and the transition from vernacular construction towards a digitally-enabled process are critically discussed. The use of robotic manufacturing is outlined and the methodology to produce the necessary samples for thermal measurement is detailed. The results of the 3D printed samples are compared with traditionally-constructed Cob material of the same dimensions. The assessment has revealed strong potential for 3D printed cob as compared to its manually constructed counterparts in terms of thermal conductivity. Moreover, the testing process has helped in identifying several challenges in the 3D printing process of cob and the assessment of its thermal properties, which will ultimately bring the work closer to full-scale applications.

In architectural design, crafts are often portrayed as a source of ornamental, figurative or historical inspiration. In this paper, instead, craft is framed as an open-ended process of making and material negotiations, involving material properties, diverging modes of knowledge production and representation, emergent tectonic configurations and embodied interaction with technology. By developing this framework, the paper aims to situate the exploratory nature of craft in the context of robotic architectural production. To achieve this, the paper develops a theoretical approach comprising notions of craft (Pye 1968. The nature and art of workmanship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), architectural tectonics (Frampton 2001. Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) and digital tectonics (Leach, Turnbull and Williams, 2004. Digital Tectonics. Wiley) in the context of robotic architectural production. Utilizing a mixed methods approach, the ongoing project ‘Computing Craft’ is presented as a case study illustrating the proposed framework in the context of cob construction. Finally, the project ‘Computing Craft’ instantiates the proposed framework and helps determine its applicability, impact and limitations.