EDUCATION

MSc education in Robotic Building (RB) has been established 2014 as part of Digital Architecture (aka Hyperbody) at TU Delft. Since 2017-19, MSc education has been also offered at Dessau Institute of Architecture (fka Bauhaus) in Germany and in 2020 as new BSc education developed for the DAAD flagship project, Vietnamese German University. Since 2024 it has been offered with increased focus on MSc 2-4 interfaculty education Moonshot+: Lunar Architecture and Infrastructure linked to research activities such as Moonshot and Rhizome implemented within the newly established Extra-/Terrestrial Architecture group.

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The focus of education at Robotic Building lab is on the integration of advanced computational design with robotic techniques in order to produce highly performative architectural formations. This implies that design is directly linked to building production and operation. RB relies on Design-to-Robotic-Production & -Operation (D2RP&O) approaches. While D2RP links design to materialisation by integrating all (from functional and formal to structural) requirements in the design of building components, D2RO integrates robotic devices into building components in order to facilitate spatial and climatic reconfiguration. Together they establish the framework for robotic production and operation at building scale. The main consideration is that in architecture and building construction the factory of the future will employ building materials and components that can be robotically processed and assembled. Thus D2RP&O processes incorporate material properties in design, control all aspects of the processes numerically, and utilise parametric design principles that can be linked to the robotic production.

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More than 100 graduations have been tutored by members of the lab amongst which several have been nominated for Archiprix and one has received the 1st Archiprix International Prize. Alumni are working in internationally renowned architectural practices and academic institutions such as Foster and Partners, UN Studio, Zaha Hadid, OMA, and ETHZ, ICD, etc. respectively.

PAST EDUCATION

BSc-MSc education focuses on Design-to-Robotic-Production & -Operation (D2RP&O) the integration of advanced computational design with robotic techniques in order to produce performance-driven architectural formations. This implies that design is directly linked to building production and operation. Students are encouraged to question conventional design processes in order to creatively challenge the interplay between contemporary culture, science, and technology, and their relation to architecture.

D2RP&O challenges conventional design processes by employing parametric approaches able to address the spatial needs and demands of today’s society. The focus is on developing cutting-edge, technology driven, performative and sustainable design solutions. The performance aspect is geared in this case towards creatively investigating the intricate linkage between subjective and objective aspects using computational abstract machines in order to derive a systemic understanding of architectural design.

D2RP

D2RP establishes the framework allowing successful implementation of robotic production at building scale. The main consideration is that in architecture and building construction the factory of the future employs building materials and components that can be robotically processed and assembled. D2RP processes incorporate material properties in design, control all aspects of the processes numerically, and utilise parametric design principles that can be linked to the robotic production. Virtual modelling and simulation interface the production and real-time operation of physically built space establishing thereby an unprecedented design to production and operation feedback loop.

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D2RO

Design-to-Robotic-Operation (D2RO), is a design approach for the development (i.e., D2RP&O) of intelligent built environments that considers the technical as well as the architectural aspects from the early stages of the design and development processes (Bier et al., 2018). In this manner, the built-environment is construed as a highly sophisticated and integrated Cyber-Physical System (CPS) consisting of mutually informing computational and physical mechanisms that operate cooperatively via a Wireless Sensor and Actuator Network (WSAN).

BSc-MSc education with focus on computational design and robotics in architecture involves a research driven design approach, which primarily focuses on articulating the complex relationship between social, environmental, spatial, technological and user-based information with physical matter. Focusing on the development of architectural designs by investigating the aforementioned information sets in an associative / parametric manner with the help of computational and analogue apparatus, this BSc-MSc education creates a solid foundation in computational design, engineering and above all paves a critical thinking process necessary for becoming a design professional in the contemporary information driven era.

During the BSc-MSc education, bottom-up and top-down approaches are addressed with respect to their deterministic and non-deterministic, as well as procedural and object-oriented intrinsic nature and their impact on design. In this context, bottom-up methodologies refer to process-oriented approaches implying deterministic use of environmental, functional, and structural data for architectural design, while top-down methodologies refer to non-deterministic choices regarding use of formal language, for instance, that are object-oriented and imply a positioning and framing of the architectural work within the contemporary architectural discourse.