Architektur aus Plastik

Plasticity: the quality of being easily shaped or molded.

Plastic: a synthetic material made from organic polymers.

Plastics have had a long history in the design and construction industry, from their use in early experiments using fiber-reinforced polymers to low-cost housing construction in the 1960s to their applications for a plethora of interior surfaces lining modern office spaces today. As a category of materials, plastics are often considered cheap, lightweight, disposable, and increasingly, unsustainable. Cheap and lightweight, however, are positive characteristics for a building envelope, particularly if other parameters like structural performance can be guaranteed. Advances in recycling and material science hold promise for future plastics made from renewable sources and reused numerous times during their lifecycle.

Plastic Architecture explores the potential for large-scale additive manufacturing (AM) technologies to disrupt the high-performance building façade industry. Through functional integration and optimization, future façade systems will possess improved thermal and structural performance while being lighter and faster to produce and install.

Following similar advances in other industries, AM technologies expand the range of geometric and topological possibilities for façade construction, allowing the introduction of seamless internal cavities and passages. AM processes have the potential to transform plastics from a low-cost commodity to a high-performance building material through their capacity to precisely tailor form. These features can be designed computationally to optimize insulation value, airflow, and light transmission. Further, through the use of transparent polymers, such as PETG—the material used in this exhibition—the entire structure of the façade panel can be made translucent. Thermoplastics, as a subset of polymers, can be transformed from a solid to a viscous liquid when heated, allowing a robotically controlled extruder to convert pelletized plastic into geometrically complex, layer-based components. Through computational design techniques these components can be optimized for multiple design inputs, including structure and light transmission/shading, as well as passive design strategies like natural ventilation.

3D printing plastic formwork can transform concrete construction and enable the production of individual freeform concrete structures quickly and cost-effectively, minimizing construction waste and labor. The degree of geometric complexity a concrete element can assume is directly linked to our ability to fabricate its formwork. Additive Manufacturing can facilitate complex freeform geometries and expanded design solutions for concrete elements. In particular, fused filament fabrication (FFF) 3D printing of thermoplastic, which is used to produce the formwork of the columns, is a particularly useful method of fabrication due to the lightweight properties of the resulting formwork and the accessibility of FFF 3D printing technology. The design and fabrication of three concrete columns investigates PLA, PVA, PETG, and the combination of PLA-PVA as a formwork material.

Through an entirely digitized design-to-production workflow for concrete formwork, 3D printing allows the integration of all functions that are needed in a concrete element. The columns showcase the additive manufacturing, enabling the prefabrication of large-scale, lightweight, and ready-to-cast freeform formwork to minimize material waste, labor, and errors in the construction process, while increasing the speed of production and economic viability of casting non-standard concrete elements.