The Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, was shaped by algorithms and fabricated by robots.Roland Halbe

The Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Germany, looks like a peanut crossed with a honeycomb. This odd, organic-looking building would’ve never been made if not for the powers of computational design and robotic manufacturing.

For the better part of history we’ve left architecture up to humans, and the results haven’t been so bad. But now, as our computers have gotten smarter and our robots more dexterous, machines are taking a turn at designing our buildings, and they’re creating things we never could have.

Designed by the team at University of Stuttgart’s Institute for Computational Design, this 2,700 sq. foot hall has a beech wood shell that’s made up of 243 unique geometric plates that latch together via more than 7,600 finger joints. Each of those plates is 50 millimeters thick—or to put that in perspective, thinner than an egg shell, if you’re looking at  ratio of thickness-to-span. The project began with a simple question: How can you create a resilient timber structure with as little material as possible? The answer, it turned out, was going to take an integration of multiple digital processes....Continue Reading

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