Ronald Rael - Printing Architecture: Innovative Recipes for 3D Printing

Mud. Or, more specifically, a few dozen PowerPoint slides of intriguing vernacular mud constructions. Thats all that was needed for me to understand that the work of Emerging Objects was more deeply connected with our own discourse at Unfold than I had previously realized. While I was intimately familiar with Ronald Rael and Virginia San Fratellos research on 3D printing architectural components with sustainable and locally sourced materials, I had somehow missed their shared, longtime fascination for earthen architecture. That is, until I sat down on the cozy chairs of the California College of the Arts auditorium in 2015 during the Data Clay Symposium, where Ronald and I each gave a presentation about our respective practices in architecture and design.

In recent years weve witnessed an unparalleled explosion of creative expression and experimentation with 3D printingnot only as a practical tool, but increasingly as a medium in its own right. A lot of media attention has gone to the wild and often baroque geometric-form languages that have been unlocked by the underpinning characteristics of 3D printing. Hod Lipson described in his book Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printingthe ten fundamental principles of 3D printing: the first is Manufacturing complexity is free. Unlike in traditional manufacturing processes, where extra complexity requires more expensive tooling, there is no such penalty with 3D printing. And hence we witness a flood of algorithmic designs straight from the future that exploit this freedom as if the objects were unbound by the laws of physics, the limits of real-world materials, or the age-old traditions and heritage of making things.

But what Ron presented onstage was not a story about elaborate computational design but a love story for the mundane material that is mud: how it is ingrained in the tradition of building worldwide, how one half of the population lives, works, or worships in buildings constructed of earth. The story of architecture for thousands of years has been the story of mud. And where clay or earth has not been easily sourced, similar narratives can be told with wood, rocks, or ice playing the lead role. It was at that point that I understood that this love for the historic and contemporary use of earth in architecture is the root of Emerging Objects quest to find a role for new technologies while respecting the codes of how weve been constructing our dwellings for ageswith locally sourced, renewable materials that possess intrinsic, enduring architectural qualities: humidity regulation, structural stability, natural cooling, and so on.

Only a handful of slides in that presentation were devoted to 3D printing, but for me they brought the story full circle, and the project shownthe Cool Brick masonry systemis probably my favorite among the projects youll find in this book. The Cool Brick provides passive evaporative cooling similar to how buildings were cooled in ancient Oman before the advent of refrigeration, with a system called the Muscatese window, consisting of a porous ceramic jar sheltered from the sun by a wood mashrabiyalatticework. The design of the Cool Brick combines these elements in a brick-size ceramic lattice that absorbs moisture and cools the air that flows through its open structure. In a clever way, the Cool Brick exploits the benefits of Lipsons first principle, Manufacturing complexity is free, while handily cycling around the pitfall of craftsmanship mimicking excessive ornamentation that is so often associated with 3D printing. In a final act, the individual bricks have been assembled in an unapologetic way by setting them in mortar, alluding to the act of bricklaying as possibly one of the oldest additive manufacturing methods.

The work of Emerging Objects has, since its inception, been mostly focused on binder jetting 3D-printing processes that fuse a powdered dry material. The company has been internationally recognized for pushing the limits of this technique by introducing new materials into a normally closed-source machine. Since a 3D object printed with binder jetting is always supported by the powder with which it is constructed, this process offers some of the greatest freedom of form of all 3D- printing techniques. As such, it seems like a regression that Virginia and Ronald recently started venturing into extrusion-based wet clay printing, a process with much greater limitations in regard to obtainable form freedom. My studio, Unfold, developed this process in 2009 out of an interest in bridging digital manufacturing and the age-old clay-forming technique called coiling. But judging by the impressive and rapidly developing body of work that Emerging Objects has gathered under the moniker GCODE.clay, it certainly feels as though using wet clay, with its intrinsic limitations and quirky behavior, might be some sort of a homecominga return to the mud.

With his partner, Claire Warnier, Dries Verbruggen leads Antwerp-based design studio Unfold.