When Professor Fabio Gramazio began constructing a scale model of his sky tower, assembled by a fleet of intelligent, interlinked quadcopters, he says his dream was to sculpt a utopian outpost that would soar into the heavens. 

Cofounder of Gramazio Kohler Research, one of the globe’s leading robotic architecture labs at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, or ETH) Zurich, Gramazio recalls that later, when NASA started launching test flights of its Ingenuity helicopter gliding above the orange-red dunes of Mars, he was struck by an epiphany: his aero-robots might one day help build the first human havens on the still-frozen Red Planet.

His ringed sky structure, built by four-winged copters, and the chopper flight breakthroughs on Mars, mark advances in “radical technological speculation,” he says, that might converge in the future. 

An architect, coder, and roboticist, Gramazio captivated the world of architecture during the 11th Venice Biennale, when his robot-artisan R-O-B created a maze of undulating brick walls, with a surreal, curved geometry echoing Einstein’s maps of space-time warped by the force of gravity. His team at the avant-garde Swiss lab returns to Venice this year to present DFAB House, an ethereal, luminous three-story structure entirely built by robots.   

Yet he says aerial bots open an even more fantastical new universe of possibilities in architecture – beyond those sparked by their ground-based cousins. Flying droids deployed on cutting-edge construction sites that can hover and land with the precision of a hummingbird might outperform not just terrestrial robots, but even the most masterful human builders, who require being surrounded by scaffolding and safety nets while piecing together jigsaw skyscrapers.   

Professor Gramazio recently presented his celestial tower during a Japanese-staged exhibition, at the Mori Art Museum, titled “Future and the Arts: AI, Robotics, Cities, Life – How Humanity Will Live Tomorrow”. The museum, a global showcase for experimental art, architecture, AI, virtual reality and cybernetics, aimed to cast a limelight on the hyper-technologies transforming the planet in the run-up to the Tokyo Olympics. Before that, Gramazio deployed his winged fleet to build a prototype of the cloud-scraping tower, in an installation called “Flight Assembled Architecture,” at the leading-edge FRAC Center in France.  

While using Rhino software to digitally sculpt a sophisticated model of the structure, Gramazio’s group perfected the software that would send “blueprints” and intricate building instructions to the squadron of helicopters collaborating to construct it.  

Professor Raffaello D’Andrea, an Italian-Swiss engineer and inventor at ETH who joined up with Gramazio to perfect the aerial construction experiment, devised an ingenious air traffic control system inside his lab-enclosed “aerodrome”.  

 A motion capture system – formed with a constellation of Vicon cameras surveying the compact heliport, drones and the expanding tower – fed updates back to the ever-changing model. Each quadcopter, while ferrying 30-centimeter modules in line with the digital foreman’s orders, likewise captured the scene with its own video camera, transmitting streams of images that would ultimately entrance visitors to the exhibitions.          

The flying robots assembled the tower – shaped like a whirlwind frozen in time – almost perfectly, and Gramazio says he one day aims to build a gigantic version of the design that would rise more than half a kilometer into the skies. 

Architects conquering airspace, he muses, is a dreamy quest that dates back at least to the times of Leonardo da Vinci, whose designs for futuristic flying machines, a robotic paladin and a waterworld city have inspired visionaries across the ages.       

This realm of starry-eyed designers has exploded over the last century, Gramazio says, with inventors like Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic spheres inspiring acolytes to propose building domed cities across other worlds. 

 Scientists at NASA and at Harvard University, conducting experiments focused on engineering life-protecting refuges on Mars, discovered that shielding glasshouses and human habitats inside hemispheres of silica aerogel could create terraformed oases across the now-frigid deserts of the planet’s equatorial zone. 

Harvard scholar Robin Wordsworth, who spearheaded the research, says in an interview that creating double-shell domes above Mars bases, built of silica aerogel and high-strength Kevlar, would raise the temperature inside these sanctuaries by more than 55 degrees Celsius – above the melting point of frozen H2O – and transmit ample sunlight for “photosynthetic life” while blocking hazardous ultraviolet radiation.

Professor Gramazio, meanwhile, in his book “The Robotic Touch: How Robots Change Architecture,” outlines his leaps in training nimble air squads to collectively fuse – in mid-air – lightweight rods into super-strong triangular modules that could be used to construct geodesic domes. 

The flight-tech demos now being conducted across the ghosts of lakes and channels that once animated Mars, he predicts, could be the forerunners to a new era of interplanetary architecture.  

As increasingly autonomous copters and rovers are enhanced with AI and computer vision, Gramazio, and confrères at technologically vanguard ateliers including Foster + Partners and Hassell, envisage intelligent swarms of robot-craftsmen collaborating to build domes and dwellings on Mars, all in advance of the first astronauts touching down. 

Yet the opening acts in the movement to rocket robots to assemble off-world architecture will play out across a closer arena: the Moon. 

With the European Space Agency, NASA, SpaceX, Roscosmos and China all racing to perfect plans to send spacefarers to the Moon before venturing onward to Mars, the silvery orb’s ancient craters could be transformed into competing labs to test out colony-construction techniques.

ESA is unique in proposing the foundation of an idyllic Moon Village  – open to astronauts and architects, coders and artists from across the globe – and is funding a fountainhead of research on this first-stage lunar trek. One contingent at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology – one of the planet’s premier science universities – is pushing forward ESA’s exploration of robotically sculpting domes and spacecraft landing pads from Moon rocks and regolith gathered around the edges of meteorite impact craters. 

But it is only on Mars that winged robots will join their terrestrial cohorts to generate sanctums of life expanding across a new world. While choppers would be forever grounded on an airless moon, “The Mars helicopter flight experiments show there is indeed enough atmosphere to fly on Mars,” Gramazio says. 

Havard Grip, chief pilot of this first Martian aircraft and a robotics technologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in California, says in an interview that future generations of helicopters will help set the stage for the human invasion of Mars.   

Outfitted with superhuman vision and mobility, advanced drones will act as high-elevation scouts for the first discoverers to touch down on the twin planet. These winged companions, he adds, will likewise aid astronauts in airlifting equipment “from base camp to expeditions in the field.”  

Fabio Gramazio says the amazingly “cool” flights of NASA’s inter-world drone augur a new era for architecture, where building designers, roboticists, aerospace engineers and utopian creators join forces to craft the basic structures for a new civilization floating along the outer boundary of the solar system’s habitable zone.   

NASA scientists and engineers have been charting their advances and adaptations to the extraterrestrial aircraft Ingenuity, in line with Martian physics, in a stream of studies – like the fascinating “Mars Helicopter Technology Demonstrator” paper co-authored by Havard Grip.  

These revelations could in turn trigger a torrent of new Mars-aimed inventions across planet Earth: Professor Gramazio says that after reviewing NASA’s test-flight chronicles, he is certain that his aero-bots, and their ever-advancing AI, can be tweaked to fly and build across the Martian dunes.    

The utopian underpinnings of flight assembled architecture, he adds, are certain to accompany these droids on their orbital odyssey to Mars.