Conceived as an architectural structure 600 m high and bringing together "autonomous flying robots with the physicality of architecture," the installation comprises 1,500 modules resulting in a 1/100 scale model of a "vertical village" that could house up to 30,000 people. The project is based on cutting-edge innovation that uses a multitude of mobile agents working in parallel and interacting as a scalable production system. These agents are individually programmed to interact, lift, transport and assemble small modules to erect in tandem a building structure that synthesizes a rigorous architectural approach by Gramazio & Kohler and a visionary autonomous system design by Raffaello D'Andrea.
"Instead of building a high-rise, some kind of standard needle-like building, we'd rather extend [the process] in order to give it a certain volumetry and a diversity in within its formal appearance," says Matthias Kolher. This imperfect cylindrical structure is being built at the FRAC centre, in Orléans, France, its porous construction offering extraordinary ventilation, transparency, and even stability. Its meshed structure looks as if the urban texture had been stretched and vertically oriented.
The computerized design takes the form of a cylinder conditioned by waves and curves. The project is borne out of concepts based on toys (Lego-like construction units, small remote-control helicopters), yet are controlled by a team of expert engineers and their autonomous systems and algorithms. And as in a science fiction movie, we suspend disbelief in the actions we see, whether the special effects are obvious or not. This technology applies to both micro and macro levels, in a game of scale that demonstrates real potential for the utopian city; this could be built in the next 50 years, as Kohler puts it. Such schemes could be the future of region-cities, with modules scattered in the middle of the countryside linked to the city center (they chose a site in the region of La Meuse, with an anchorage point on the line of the high-speed TGV train, one hour from Paris).
Whilst visions for 1-kilometer or so high urban megastructures used to assemble primarily in basic shapes (such as a triangle or an ellipse), the technical input of these flying vehicles provides a more subtle approach to such buildings. The installation addresses radical new ways of thinking and materializing architecture as a physical process of dynamic formation. This technology-driven utopian project hasn't reached a final form yet but the process does make believers out of visitors. The 6 meter structure built by these quadrimotor drones over the course of four days will be kept in the permanent collection of the FRAC Centre in Orléans. It could, in the near future, be the model of a 600-meter high, 350-meter diameter cylinder that we will call a city.
Grégoire Basdevant
02.11.2011–19.02.2012
Gramazio & Kohler and Raffaello D'Andrea: Architectures volantes [Flight-assembled architecture]
FRAC Centre
12 rue de la Tour Neuve, Orléans