Foam Making Sense - behavioral additive deposition and stigmergic agency for integrated surface tectonics

Abstract

This thesis research deals with the architectural project from an interdisciplinary point of view, integrating biomimetics, additive fabrication, computer vision, and robotics. The work focuses on the feedback interaction loop among robotic additive fabrication, a stigmergic agent-based system and the self-organizing properties of the material. The aim is to explore the morphological, constructive and expressive potentials generated by the mutual influence of computational design, construction behavioral rules, and physical material behavior (whose complexity exceeds current simulation capacity).The proposed approach leads to the creation of surface-based tectonics, enhanced with a fiberglass-coated dendritic ridge formation that integrates functional, ornamental and structural performances. The process can be extended to larger architectural scales with the creation of bespoke EPS molds via robotic hot wire cutting; the presented case study leverages the aforementioned process on ruled surfaces for the generation of translucent delimiters, used to create heterogeneous spatial organization.