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The Brick Labyrinth is re-visiting one of the most archaic building techniques, dry-stacked brick walls, in a completely new setting.

This project was a collective work within my master study in the ETH-Zurich Master of Advanced Studied(MAS) in Architecture and Digital Fabrication program, academic year in 2016-2017. There were 17 students divided into 4 groups consisting of Design, Fabrication, Structure and Tooling. I was in the strucutre group, mainly resbonsible for developing an algorithm for stability check.

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For the first time, We used a multi-robotic gantry system in the Robotic Fabrication Laboratory to build a full-scale architectural installation of a brick labyrinth. We used computational tools not only to iterate through designs but also to check the stability and feasibility of the produced structures and to generate the sequence and commands to control the multi-robotic fabrication of the final structure. Together with multiple iterations of physical tests and prototypes, this allowed us to design and build the labyrinth which consisted of over 10000 bricks with a weight of 30 tons in under 4 weeks.

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“Dry Stacking” plays the main challenge role throughout the whole project. With no collapsing as criteria inside the RFL, Stability check as a crucial factor to determine the entire structure. Our structure group developed stability check script showing in each brick whether the resultant force was inside the contact areas of brick to evaluate feasible layout for the design team.

sequential stacking until collapsing occured in red bricks. stability check on overall inclined strucutre .

Bond Transition

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The bond transition and configuration between bricks changes at the places where light penetrating are needed and as counter-balance elements to increase the inclined ratio for shifting the center of mass on entire structure.

a parametric model was developed for studying smooth bond transition in design phase.

project video.

Honored to be featured in the latest issue of “igloo” in Romania. “Brick Labyrinth” project that MAS students tackled at MAS ETH DFAB is published. igloo #179 Parametricism și reprezentare image

Project Lead: Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH-Zurich

Tutors: David Jenny, Luka Piskorec, Stefana Parascho, Hannes Mayer

MAS Students 2016/17: Rodrigo Díaz, Ahmed Elshafei, Marirena Kladeftira, Matteo Pacher, Sambit Samant, Iacovina Kontiza, Theodora Spathi, Marco Caprani, Hakim Hasan, Maria Pachi, Federico Giacomarra, Coralie Ming, Samuel Cros, Thodoris Kyttas, Wataru Nagatomo, Shaun Dai-Syuan Wu, Matthias Leschok

Sponsors and Collaborators: Keller AG Ziegeleien

Special Thanks: Mike Lyrenmann and Philippe Fleischmann (Robotic Fabrication Laboratory), Andreas Reusser (Concrete Lab)