Architectural Record 2015-04

34
ARCHITECTURAL RECORD APRIL 2015
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construction debris. This printer is a whopping
20 feet tall, 33 feet wide and 132 feet long.
In January, with an even larger printer, they
fabricated a five-story apartment building and
a neoclassical mansion. WinSun could not be
reached for comment.
Unlike the Chinese and Dutch projects, a
research team at the University of California,
Berkley, is developing small 3-D printed tilelike
“bricks” to build rooms and other small
structures. In March, the team unveiled
Bloom, a lacy 9-foot-tall pavilion made from
a specially developed polymer of Portland
cement, vegetable oil, and sawdust. Composed
of 840 individual bricks, each assigned a number
and bound together with stainless-steel
fasteners, the pavilion can easily be dismantled
and reassembled. After the pavilion’s stint
at Berkley, it will be displayed in Thailand at
the headquarters of Siam Cement Group (SCG),
the company that sponsored the project.
The team is working to push their product
to market. With the studio’s 11 printers, they
can make approximately 30 bricks daily, but,
unlike the Chinese firm’s, this team’s objective
is not necessarily speed or increasingly large
printed components—instead they see value in
the resolution and craftsmanship that smaller
pieces afford.
“Other companies are making architecturalsized
machines with the assumption that
architectural-sized machines will produce
architecture,” says Ronald Rael, the associate
professor who led the Berkeley project. “There’s
a lot of craft in this. It’s not simply that the
robot is doing all the work.” ■
A team at UC Berkeley unveiled the world’s first
freestanding powder-printed cement 3-D structure (top
and bottom, left; above). The pavilion, called Bloom, is
made up of 840 individual bricks, which form a lacy floral
pattern when joined together. The pavilion is 9 feet tall
and has a footprint of 144 square feet.
PHOTOGRAPHY: © MATTHEW MILLMAN