Flexible living schemes

Of course, some version of customisation has been available for a while in residential buildings. Developers and architects around the world almost always offer users the possibility of modifying apartments from colour-schemes to flooring and kitchen-design. What is different about Danubio, says Turanyi, is that “we are offering to develop different living schemes for each apartment.”

“ We have many options on how to create your own living space. ”

“In one space, for example, you might have the kitchen and the living area,” he explains. “In the standard scheme we propose to put the living area into a deeper, darker area. But our users will have the option to change that. Instead they can have the kitchen in the deeper part of the space. We have many options on how to create your own living space, how many rooms you want to have and where you want them put.”

As well as offering added freedom to end users, this process also fundamentally changes the role of the architect, Turanyi says, in particular the relationship they have with developers and end-users.

“It changes our position in the whole process,” he says. “It means we are much more connected on the one hand to our clients and developers who we can much more easily react to, and on the other hand to people who will actually be living in these apartments.”

Tackling Hungary’s housing crisis

The original logic for using digital algorithms at Danubio was to overcome what Turanyi describes as a “crisis” and “shortage” in large-scale housing developments in Hungary. In 2016, during the design competition phase, developers in the country lacked the right market information to make informed decisions on how many apartments to build and of what size.

“ When we started the project, our developer had no proper market information and didn’t know what to build. ”

“They just didn’t know what could easily be sold on the market,” says Turanyi. “Usually developers have a very strict programme in terms of sizing specification of a building. They’ll say ‘I want 50 percent at 50 square metres, 25 percent at 70 and the rest at 100’, for example. But during this period, when we started the project, our developer had no proper market information and didn’t know what to build.

Designing an algorithm which could change the configuration of the building including the size and number of apartments was the natural response to this problem, according to Turanyi. During the design process, he says the layout of the building was changed three separate times to reflect “new and updated information that we got from the developer.”

From Bauhaus to Metabolism – the movements that inspired Danubio

The idea of designing a building that can change and adapt is nothing new. When asked about influences, Turanyi mentions the Japanese post-war Metabolism movement, which brought together a group of architects and designers who believed that cities and buildings were in a constant process of evolving. They designed prefabricated, cell-like structures that could be replaced when needed. The Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo remains one of the most interesting and visually striking examples.

“ The modular logic we are using is very close to the great Japanese metabolic movement. ”

“The modular logic we are using is very close to the great Japanese metabolic movement,” says Turanyi. “You are using modules to make flats or living spaces that are comfortable for a certain person for a certain given social and economic purpose.”

Turayni also mentions the legacy of the Bauhaus movement - interwar Europe’s most influential art institution – in Budapest as an influence on the Danubio project.

“We had a very interesting period of housing design in the 1930s,” he says. “People built a lot of modernist, Bauhaus-connected residential buildings that are still working today. Obviously we cannot afford to build houses like that and the design is not something we want to formally follow, but the way of reacting in a logical and rational way to the current social and economic situation we are facing is key. The logic of those houses can be continued just with different architectural tools and designs.

Of course, there is still much work to be done in terms of using algorithms to improve residential design. While the technology is easily available to architects and designers the “traditional construction industry is not so up to date,” Turayni says.

“For these designs to be realised on-site is a huge challenge,” he adds. “Our main goal is to have a process where all of this customisable information and custom-made products can be produced and delivered easily in a smooth way.”

That’s a goal Turayni is certainly optimistic about reaching however: “For us this is just the first step but the world of architecture and construction is definitely turning in this direction.”

Robotics: a tough hill to climb in construction

For the last few years, momentum has been building behind the idea of integrating robotic technologies far more deeply in the construction process, both as a solution to the skills shortage issue and as a stimulant to flagging productivity on sites. Industrial robots have found a prominent role in automotive manufacturing and a range of other industries; according to the International Federation of Robotics, there are more than two million robotic units in production at factories worldwide, and there is one robot for every five human workers at car assembly plants.

“ There needs to be a willingness to adapt and change in the construction industry. ”

While robots have come online in a big way in many industries, the construction sector has been slow to follow suit. With repetitive, precision-focused tasks and a static, well-controlled environment, factory floors tend to be well-suited to robotic input. By contrast, construction sites in many ways represent the nightmare scenario for robotics developers. Job sites are by nature exposed to the elements and highly dynamic, requiring workers to move around and perform a range of bespoke tasks – all of which pose a challenge to robots, which excel in set, programmable tasks.

“Construction sites are very different from the majority of workplaces in that most of the work takes place outside, in highly unstructured environments,” said ABI Research director of robotics research Dan Kara in an interview with CBC last year.

Until relatively recently, these were nigh-insurmountable challenges for robotics manufacturers, while the construction industry remains dominated by traditional skills and methods, and hasn’t been demonstrably receptive to digital innovation.

“The robotic technologies that have been available either haven’t presented a true end-to-end automated solution, or they take an inordinate amount of time to set up, or have limitations in terms of materials or their ability to implement different designs,” says Mark Pivac, chief technology officer at Fastbrick Robotics, a Perth-based robotics company that is developing a robotic bricklaying system dubbed Hadrian X.

“Secondly, there needs to be a willingness to adapt and change in the construction industry,” Pivac continues. “Bricklaying is a great example of a process in the construction industry that has essentially stayed the same for the last 6,000 years.”

Embracing robots at the construction site: Hadrian X and Built Robotics

As a result, the role of robotic systems in construction has tended to be limited to tasks such as off-site fabrication and project surveys. 3D printing of materials such as concrete and carbon fibre allows for the pre-fabrication of complex architectural forms, as demonstrated last year by a team at the University of Stuttgart, which used static robots and a custom drone to weave a carbon-fibre pavilion inspired by moth webs.

But as robotic machine learning and mobility capabilities improve, robots are increasingly being seen as a new frontier in on-site productivity, and are now being supported by government policy in many countries. Japan is a prominent example, having launched the ‘i-Construction’ initiative in 2016 to increase the use of robotics and digital technologies to improve productivity and address the industry’s labour crisis.

“ The robots basically do the 80% the work which is more repetitive, more dangerous, more monotonous. ”

Fastbrick’s Hadrian X robotic bricklayer is joining a range of systems – such as California-based Built Robotics’s automated bulldozer – that are being developed to handle the more repetitive tasks on construction projects, freeing up their human counterparts to do the more intricate work.

“The robots basically do the 80% the work which is more repetitive, more dangerous, more monotonous,” Built Robotics founder and CEO Noah Ready-Campbell told Associated Press in March. “And then the operator does the more skilled work, where you really need a lot of finesse and experience.”

Improvements in stability, mobility and precision have helped bring robots to the brink of acceptance in mainstream construction – Hadrian X is designed to lay bricks many times faster than a human can, and build the shell of a residential house in just two days.

“The Hadrian X will be the first construction robot that can deliver product – such as bricks and blocks – over long distances in uncontrolled environments with pinpoint accuracy,” says Pivac. “This is all made possible by the underlying Dynamic Stabilisation Technology, or ‘DST’, which measures environmental factors and accounts for them in real time. This means that when we are delivering product such as blocks over a 30m boom, the laying head will place the block with sub-millimetre accuracy despite environmental factors like wind.”

Can robots help deliver a digital future?

As well as taking charge of mundane tasks and improving safety for human workers, robotics has also emerged as a new project management tool. Silicon Valley AI firm Doxel, for instance, has launched a robot to scan sites, interpret data to measure progress and quality, and report back to project managers on whether various construction elements are proceeding to plan. The track-mounted robot, which incorporates LIDAR and deep learning algorithms, is being touted as a solution to the industry’s productivity issues, with the vast majority of projects falling behind schedule and going over budget to some extent.

“ Deeper integration of robotics in construction projects is a matter of when, not if. ”

Software such as computer-aided design and building information modelling tools have effectively digitised the building design process, and robots have the potential to support this process in pre-fab manufacturing and on-site construction. In this way, robots could dramatically narrow the gap between an architect’s vision and the practical reality of a completed project.

“Technology is always improving, so deeper integration of robotics in construction projects is a matter of when, not if,” says Pivac. “When the Hadrian X programme was initiated in the early 2000s, computer processing power was a fraction of what it is now. Digital definition of design and management of the value creation chain is also a big factor. The commercial construction industry has already seen positive introduction of BIM and Hadrian X will facilitate the introduction of a more complete digital process to residential building and push commercial building to even higher levels of data integrity and completeness.”

Swiss STEM university ETH Zurich, a hub for advances in digitisation and robotics in construction, has recently been testing digital fabrication and construction using timber.

Researchers from the university’s Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication are using robots to cut and arrange timber beams into more complex forms than would have been possible previously, with the robots cutting and arranging the beams using data from a CAD model. The timber assemblies are being built on-site to create a residential unit on the top two floors of DFAB HOUSE, a demonstrator for the digital fabrication concept in the Zurich suburb of Dübendorf.

“If any change is made to the project overall, the computer model can be constantly adjusted to meet the new requirements,” said ETH Zurich professor of architecture and digital fabrication Matthias Kohler in March. “This kind of integrated digital architecture is closing the gap between design, planning and execution.”