Autonomous assembly : designing for a new era of collective construction
About the guest-editor: Skylar Tibbits -- From automated to autonomous assembly / Skylar Tibbits -- Combinatorial commons: social remixing in a sharing economy / Jose Sanchez -- How specific interactions drive the complex organisation of building blocks / Zorana Zeravcic -- From self-assembly to evolutionary structures / Athina Papdopoulou, Jared Laucks and Skylar Tibbits -- The vanishing actor: how to let things happen: the art of order without orders / Robin Meier and Bastien Gallet -- Complex design by simple robots: a collective embodied intelligent approach to construction / Kirstin Petersen and Radhika Nagpal -- Crowd-driven pattern formation: computational strategies for large-scale design and assembly / Marcelo Coelho and Tovi Grossman -- The immersive: stagecraft to urbanism / Simon Kim and Mariana Ibañez -- Baskets and architecture: ritualistic making and collective design / Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch -- Aleatory construction based on jamming: stability through self-confinement / Kieran Murphy, Leah Roth, dan Peterman and Heinrich Jaeger -- Granular jamming of loadbearing and reversible structures: rock print and rock wall / Petrus Aejmelaeus-Lindström, Ammar Mirjan, Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler, Schendy Kernizan, Björn Sparrman, Jared Laucks and Skylar Tibbits -- Granular construction: designed particles for macro-scale architectectural structures / Karola Dierichs and Achim Menges -- Distributed structures: digital tools for collective design / Caitlin Mueller -- Compressive assemblies: bottom-up performance for a new form of construction / Philippe Block, Matthias Rippman and Tom Van Mele -- Disarmed strategies: new machines and techniques for an era of computational contextualism in architecture / Hannes Mayer, Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler -- 2060: an autonomously crafted built environment / Alvise Simondetti, Chris Luebkeman and Gereon Uerz -- Autonomous assembly as the fourth approach to generic construction / Andong Lu.
We are now on the brink of a new era in construction - that of autonomous assembly. For some time, the widespread adoption of robotic and digital fabrication technologies has made it possible for architects and academic researchers to design non-standard, highly customised structures. These technologies have largely been limited by scalability, focusing mainly on top-down, bespoke fabrication projects, such as experimental pavilions and structures. Autonomous assembly and bottom-up construction techniques hold the promise of greater scalability, adaptability and potentially evolved design possibilities. By capitalising on the advances made in swarm robotics, the collective construction of the animal/insect kingdom, and advances in physical computational, programmable materials or self-assembly, architects and designers are now able to build from the bottom up. This issue presents future scenarios of autonomous assembly by highlighting the viability of decentralised, collective assembly systems, demonstrating the potential to deliver reconfigurable and adaptive solutions