FeaTure
Architectural Robotics,
Inevitably
Mark D. Gross
Carnegie Mellon University | mdgross@cmu.edu
Keith Evan Green
Clemson University | kegreen@clemson.edu
January + February 2012
interactions
Information and communication
technologies (ICT) extend a long
line of emerging technologies that
have reshaped our built environment and, consequently, society,
over millennia. In antiquity, Roman
arches afforded greater freedom of
movement, physically and socially.
In the Middle Ages, flying buttresses
allowed light to magnificently penetrate once heavy walls. And in the
Industrial Age, reinforced concrete,
structural steel, and free-plan organizational systems accommodated
mass gatherings of people at work
and play. In our Information Age,
ICT is increasingly embedded into
the physical fabric of the built environment in order to intelligently
control heating, air conditioning,
and lighting, as well as to transform
building facades into vast computer
displays. But while ICT can intelligently move temperature-controlled
air through building interiors, and
digital bits across building surfaces,
it also promises to move physical
building elements to create intelligent,
adaptive built environments responsive to the challenges and opportunities of a digital society.
Beyond operable windows and
movable partitions (new tech-
nologies of past centuries) and
centrally controlled heating and
ventilation (an innovation of the
20th century), we are now to a
point that science fiction writers
and futurists have long foreseen:
architectural robotics—intelli-
gent and adaptable built environ-
ments that sense, plan, and act.
• Figure 1. The user-programmable robotic
animated Work Environment [a WE] shapes
and supports the working life of creative col-laborators dealing with new and old, digital
and analog, materials and tools. Credit: Keith
Evan Green, Clemson University
