The Super Powers of Wood Buildings That Shape Themselves

[Music]

today we’re going to talk

about shape so shape is everywhere

around us

and what you might not realize is how

the things that we use

every day are actually shaped things

like the seat of your chair

are produced by by pulling and pushing

on the materials

with giant hydraulic presses to fit

exactly to the contours of your body

and when it comes to shape some of the

largest things that we need to shape

are for our buildings in architecture

shape gives us form and structure

and it creates the things in which we

inhabit every day

so let’s first talk about a building

here in stuttgart

so this is a really controversial

building

but i like it i love the architectural

features

the way that the light can enter from

above and most of all i really like the

geometry

it’s smooth and elegant but what i don’t

like about this building

is how it’s made because well as

architects we’ve developed digital

processes to optimize our models on the

screen

and robotically produce the parts which

make up each piece of our building

the way in which we physically do it is

still i would argue

backwards so for these columns for

example we actually have to build them

three times first we build them from

steel

to form reinforcement and it needs to be

shaped every single piece of steel

then we build it from wood solid wood

in order to form a formwork in which we

can finally

pour the concrete which will form the

final piece

and in developing these processes

they’ve become complex

and involves supply chains that reach

around the globe

what’s clear is that despite our

advances

we still rely on very basic processes

in order to create the shapes

and the problem with this is that they

eat up tons of energy and material

and bought in wuttenberg for example by

some recent estimates

the construction industry alone

contributes over 50

of the material waste for everything

that we use

and when we think about carbon and

embedded energy

we often think about things like flying

less

or riding our bike to work or making our

cars more efficient

but what we really should think about is

the fact that buildings alone

contribute dramatically more to the

problems of sustainability

than transport or other aspects

and when we try to solve these problems

we generally try to go more high-tech

we think about how robots can make

things more efficient and processes can

become

more precise but in the end we still

rely

on brute force methods to form and shape

our materials

for example we carve things with higher

force and more precision

or we bend pull or push our materials

into shape

and this just becomes a larger and

larger problem as things get bigger

the robots have to become bigger

and in many cases you might say that we

even rely on aggressive processes

where the materials play a completely

passive role

in the final components in which they

might become

so now let’s imagine a different way of

generating shape

so we’re in a forest with trees around

us and the light coming in from above

and it’s completely silent and in this

forest there’s shaping happening all

around us

all the time and i’m not talking about

living trees

or growing things what i’m talking about

are things like pine cones or seed pods

and what these what these pine cones are

able to do is that the scales

on the side of the cone are actually

able to change their shape

in changes with relative humidity in the

air and this means that a pine cone can

can remain closed when it needs to

protect its seeds

and open up only when it’s dry enough at

the precisely the right moment

in order to release its seeds now what’s

amazing about this

is it happens in millions of pinecones

all around the world

and it does so not by a machine or a

computer

or a microcontroller or any sort of

sensor

it does so because the hydroscopic

fibers that are laid

inside of its its skin

and when these fibers get wet they

expand and when they dry

they shrink and what’s even more

astounding

is that this process happens after the

pinecone has been cut off

from the supplies of the tree so there’s

also no living energy involved

and what this means is that even a pine

cone that’s 12 million

years old and fossilized when we take it

out

and put it in water or dry it out it

still retains the ability to change

shape now i absolutely love

robots and i love computers

but i have to say that when i see how

simply the pinecone works

and how well it works in order to

generate shape i have to say

that even after 12 years i would still

rely on the pine cone over a robot

now our goal here is to see how

if the pine cone can generate shapes so

smoothly and so fluidly

we can actually use a similar approach

to shape the way we build our buildings

and to do that we use a really high-tech

material any ideas

we use wood so wood is one of the most

abundant natural resources

on our planet and the best part of all

is that it regenerates

it comes back if we plant more trees and

we’re planting more and more trees

now what is involved in the construction

industry for hundreds of years

but what you might not know about wood

is that just like the pine cone

it has this strange ability to change

shape when it gets wet

and when it dries and this is something

that has caused problems

for many many years and scientists have

struggled to figure out ways in order to

keep our walls

not from moving but

at the same time if you really look at

the wood the forces inside of it are so

strong that it can rip itself apart the

forces are so powerful

that ancient greeks use them to split

granite blocks from their quarries

so what we want to do is see how we can

harness this force in wood

to generate design shapes that we want

for our buildings and in my group at the

university of stuttgart

we call this concept material

programming because

similar to how we can program movement

in robots digitally

we think we can also physically arrange

materials in a way in which they

generate shape

themselves

so to do so in our first studies we

looked at how we could take apart a tree

trunk

in the fewest amount of steps possible

and rearrange it into a really nice

shape

without using any mold to do this

it’s pretty simple we basically build a

giant puzzle

so we take apart the wood we put it into

small triangles and then we

rearrange it but each triangle has a

specific direction and this determines

how it will change shape

here we use beechwood a wood that my

grandfather likely would have split

up and used as firewood precisely

because it’s going to change into

strange shapes so it’s not so good for

anything else

but here once we have this flat sheet

all we have to do is add water

and slowly the shape emerges

and in the same way again by removing

the water

we can reverse the effect

now this might seem like a small art

project or something for a bit of fun we

can make a piece of wood change shape

because these pieces are pretty small

and we could imagine shaping them with

our hands or with a few tools

but when we imagine shaping something

the size of a wall

or a column then it becomes hard to

imagine how we might do it or even a

robot might do this

effectively and that’s where we start to

look at how we can upscale this process

to do so we have to do two things first

we have to be able to precisely predict

the change in shape

and this is where our computational

design tools come in

because with these tools we can do this

much more accurately than we’ve ever

been

able to do before the second thing is

that we needed to stop

changing shape when we want to use it in

our building and that will come to later

so the production of these types of

pieces begins like any normal sawmill we

have to first cut the logs

into boards and here we use freshly cut

spruce wood which starts with a

relatively high moisture content

just when it comes from the tree then we

combine these boards into two ply layups

which we call bi layers

these are five meter long really serious

pieces of wood

and when we put these bilayers into a

kiln we can dry them out

and inside the shape emerges completely

autonomously

smoothly and coordinated all at the same

time

in a giant piece of wood after which we

can take these bilayers that are then

curved

all to the same curvature and we can

combine them to form bigger components

for our building

and by layering two of them together and

connecting them

we therefore stop the change in shape

meaning that we have a form stable

component then all we have to do

is slightly trim the edges to add some

detailing so that we can connect them

later

we use these thin high curvature pieces

in order

to build a tower structure the tower

cantilevers 14 meters into the sky

yet it’s built from just 90 millimeter

thick clt

on the interior the curvature gives the

wood an entirely new

architectural and spatial expression

it’s not something that we’ve seen

before

the curvature is soft almost like a

pillow

and it’s friendly to touch

and the best part of this is that we’re

able to do this in a way that is

elegantly designed

ecological and efficient

it just makes sense

now on the other side of the scale we

can think about smaller pieces and we

can think about how our buildings

operate every day we open and close our

windows

or we have an automated shading system

and for many years our group in the

university of stuttgart has been

studying how we could actually use the

change in shape in wood

in smaller veneer pieces to build

systems that operate in relation to the

outside environment

to do so we use very thin pieces of wood

that respond

cyclically this means we can create

systems

that open for example when it’s sunny

and then automatically

close up when the rain is approaching

but there are some limitations with

using wood in this way

it can only bend a certain way because

it has this beautiful

natural structure so in our more recent

work

we look at how we can break down certain

parts of the wood

and turn these into materials that we

can then use 3d printing to arrange in

very specific patterns

this means we can give wood a new

function we can allow it to bend

it can be flexible and it can be porous

and through doing so we can create an

entirely new generation

of shape-changing mechanisms mechanisms

that are soft

but still use the power of wood

and like the pinecone these things can

operate

over and over again reliably

they just happen to work there’s no

trick there’s no

machine and there’s no computer

so in the future i think we will build

buildings not with machines but by

cleverly understanding the way in which

materials work

the very materials that they’re made of

and it’s my hope

that by doing so we can build more

ecologically

smarter higher faster and best of all

silently thank you