Abstract
Construction materials and techniques have witnessed major advancements due to the application of digital tools in the design and fabrication processes, leading to a wide array of possibilities, especially in additive digital manufacturing tools and 3D printing techniques, scales, and materials. However, possibilities carry responsibilities with them and raise the question of the sustainability of 3D printing applications in the built environment in terms of material consumption and construction processes: how should one use digital design and 3D printing to achieve minimum material use, minimum production processes, and optimized application in the built environment? In this work, we propose an optimized formal design of “Biodigital Barcelona Clay Bricks” to achieve sustainability in the use of materials. These were achieved by using a bottom-up methodology of biolearning to extract the formal grammar of the bricks that is suitable for their various applications in the built environment as building units, thereby realizing the concept of formal physiology, as well as employing the concept of fractality or pixilation by using 3D printing to create the bricks as building units on an architectural scale. This enables the adoption of this method as an alternative construction procedure instead of conventional clay brick and full-scale 3D printing of architecture on a wider and more democratic scale, avoiding the high costs of 3D printing machines and lengthy processes of the one-step, 3D-printed, full-scale architecture, while also guaranteeing minimum material consumption and maximum forma–function coherency. The “Biodigital Barcelona Clay Bricks” were developed using Rhinoceros 3D and Grasshopper 3D + Plugins (Anemone and Kangaroo) and were 3D printed in clay.
Highlights
As an urgent worldwide demand, achieving sustainability in the construction sectors has become a vital need
We propose the pixelation or the tessellation of the architectural construction process by 3D printing building units or bricks to attain sustainability through two main aspects: minimum material usage and formal sufficiency through fractal dimensions
This form-finding simulation contributed to the novelty of the proposed concept of pixelating the architectural 3D printing and is a further step in the democratization the dominant trend of celebrating the advancements in 3D printing tools in the construction realm
Summary
As an urgent worldwide demand, achieving sustainability in the construction sectors has become a vital need. These bricks were designed using a reaction–diffusion algorithm simulating the reaction of water diffusion in a clay brick based on its hydrophilic nature and connecting the latest point in water absorption in this clay brick through the shortest path algorithm to achieve material density optimization that is informed by natural models This optimized brick design was manipulated through different spatial iterations following the formal physiology of each design case, as well as achieving sustainability in the construction process by using 3D printing on a fractal scale. All these terms explain the “fractal dimension” that was pivotal to accomplishing the objective of this paper This 3D printed architecture pixilation offers a vanguard method to popularize, democratize, and facilitate the usage of 3D printing as an efficient and affordable tool in the architectural construction realm, avoiding the high cost of full-scale, one-step, 3D-printed architecture or uncontrolled material deposition, thereby achieving 3D-printed architecture in a flexible and sustainable way, in addition to its endless formal iterations.
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