student team: Martin Firera, Julian Hildebrand, Ohad Meyuhas, Jordi Portell

teaching staff: Marta Male-Alemany, Victor Viña, Brian Peters

Our project “material networks” is based upon the investigation of a multimaterial building processes with the aim of being able to generate material networks which depending  on environmental factors on site such as heat, light, wind may feature specialized physical properties according to  the quantity and deposition of the single materials in the network. The deposition process is based on a piling principle. The project is still progressing,meanwhile some of the accomplished tasks and stages of the project are illustrated below.

test in variation of deposition sequence

manual deposition test with colored sand; creation of vertical and overlapping partitions between piles depending on tempism during deposition process. If piles are generated consecutively piles overlap each other, if deposition happens at the same time the a close to vertical separation between piles emerges.

machinic material deposition setup; colored sand has been poured from three nozzles contemporaneously.

we expected to see purely vertical partitions emerging during contemporaneous deposition of piles; instead due to imprecision inthe deposition process we had clearly blurred areas between two piles

testing realtion of quantity of water and layer thickness during hardening process with cement

machinic control of deposition with new nozzle

In order to organize the deposition of multiple materials machinically we created a nozzle prototype which can be filled with custom plastic bottles containing sand, cement or any other granular material sort. This nozzle can be connected to the shopbot at Iaac, a 3-axis milling machine which during the development of a separate machine can serve for first experiments in material deposition. Switch of scale

for further information please download our  “midterm presentation” pdf

click here for short documentation movies of material tests