This article was first published in the October 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Architect Xavier de Kestelier likes to experiment with emerging technologies -- from laser-wielding robots to virtual reality -- as a way to design complex buildings. The UK firm where he works -- Foster + Partners -- is responsible for some of the world's most iconic buildings, including 30 St Mary Axe, aka the Gherkin, in London, and Hong Kong International Airport. Its latest big project? The new Apple base in Cupertino.
De Kestelier co-heads the firm's specialist modelling group: "We were asked by the European Space Agency to design a habitation for the Moon," de Kestelier says. "The result is an inflatable skeleton structure that can be flatpacked, and robots that can use Moon dust to 3D-print a shell." De Kestelier gives WIRED a tour of the lab's coolest projects.
****WIRED:What's innovations are behind the Moon base project?
The European Space Agency was our most interesting collaborator. It was interested in exploring the potential of regolith, or Moon dust, as a material with which to build habitation and shielding on the Moon. The idea was that we would flatpack an inflatable core and then use 3D printing to build a dome or shell around it, so we could shield the astronauts from gamma radiation from the Sun, micro-meteorites that hit at 18kps and protect against temperature fluctuations on the Moon. We designed a device to solidify the dust layer by layer and build it. You usually need a machine bigger than the thing you want to print - but we designed small machines that worked together to build a part bigger than themselves. That was the innovation.
What does your team work on within the larger context of building?
De Kestelier: The team started in the late 90s when we were going to design the Gherkin, and Sage Gateshead. Both are very complex geometrical buildings and we realised we needed some expertise to be able to model them digitally and to fabricate them. The team was formed to come up with strategies on how to make these designs buildable. Although they look curved, they don't have curved elements. The Gherkin is all flat planes and only one curved element on the roof. We also wanted to understand how these buildings behaved according to physics - how the winds flow around them, how they heat up. Our buildings aren't just curvy, they are designed according to certain rules. We needed some high-end analysis tools to understand how environmental parameters were influencing our buildings. So we have two sub-teams of 22 people - one looking at geometry and fabrication, and the other at building physics.
Architects making simulations isn't that unusual...
The team doesn't have just architects -- we have engineers, computer scientists, acousticians, aerospace engineers, mathematicians, material scientists, artists and roboticists. All of these people are experts in their own fields, but also digital experts. They have already written their own software to make data modelling easier. For instance Kangaroo, a live physics engine for interactive simulation, was written by our colleague Daniel Piker. Pachyderm, which is a plugin for acoustics, was made by [team member] Arthur van der Harten.
What tools are currently exciting you?
We are looking ahead to the next big thing that could help us create buildings. The big focus has been augmented reality and virtual reality. How do you immerse yourself in a model? We've been testing all the headsets that have been coming out, Oculus Rift and others. For example, we were working on a skyscraper, and we wanted to walk the client up to a certain level of a building to show them the views from there, so we used the Oculus Rift. We have a colleague who uses an Oculus to design with. She was designing a shading device -- a louvre system -- and she wanted to walk around the building and test out different options, to see the light effect, how much Sun was coming through, whether views were blocked and to see how well the shading device worked. That's one of the first things we've designed with the Oculus.
Do many team projects become part of the larger practice?
We often try out new technologies and see how that can be implemented in our work. 3D printing is one example. We started that more than ten years ago, around 2004, when we were working on a 42-metre-long motor yacht. We usually create a lot of physical moulds and digital models when planning a structure. In this case, I could make digital models very quickly and accurately, but it was harder to create physical models because it was so geometrically complex. So I proposed buying a 3D printer - we were one of the first architectural firms to buy one. We realised we could use it for any project in the office. It started with me running the machine, but then we spun it off and started a model shop, which is now the largest facility of any architecture firm. It's also the largest set-up of fabrication machines in central London. It's embedded in the whole practice.
What's your next experiment?
We are doing trials to see how robots could help us in our design process. One project was a creating a pressed metallic table for Italian furniture manufacturer Molteni. We were unable to make a digital model -- it was all dependent on the physics of the deformations of the metal, so it was too hard to code. We thought we could use a robot arm to fabricate a physical model which could crush the metal according to different incisions laser-cut into the metal. Based on how we made the cuts, we were then able to get different results. It turned out great. That was the first project and now we are working on others. It's a universal robot -- you just get an arm and it can position itself in a point in space very accurately, connecting digital and physical space. That's the essence of all our work -- it jumps between the physical and digital worlds, from analysis and simulations, to 3D printing and robots.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
