WASP has announced it has completed construction of the Trabeculae Pavilion, an entirely 3D printed lightweight architecture solution that combines advancements in 3D printing with bio-inspired computational design.
The unique synergy of design, material and manufacturing technologies has enabled the conceptualisation of an innovative construction technique based on an additive process to build architectural forms conceived with a load-responsive material organisation. Five WASP printers worked were used for the fabrication of the structure: four DeltaWASP 4070 and a DeltaWASP 60100. The WASP printer farm for the project was installed in the laboratories of Department ABC of Politecnico di Milano, where parallel production processes have been run for a continuous production time of 4352 hours in total. The use of a WASP Spitfire extruder was introduced for the first time to shape stiff components within a minimal amount of time.
Figure 1: Trabeculae Pavilion is inspired by the trabecular bone and realized with Additive Manufacturing © Gabriele Seghizzi
The resulting prototype is the result of doctoral research by Roberto Naboni, who designed and developed the pavilion at Politecnico di Milano, together with a team of specialists in experimental design and construction. The project looks to 3D Printing for answers to the emerging problem of scarcity in material resources. The design is based on a computational process that finds inspiration in nature, specifically in the materialisation logics of the trabeculae – the internal cells that form the bone microstructure. From this research, custom algorithms have been developed to support the creation of a cellular load-responsive structure with continuous variations in size, topology, orientation and section, in order to maximise material efficiency.
The new pavilion is a load-responsive shell composed by 352 components covering a total area of 36 square metres, shaped additively by a 112 kilometre-long extrusion of a high-resistance biopolymer, specifically developed with industrial partner FILOALFA to elevate Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) for construction purposes. The innovative methods involved in the design allow for an efficient material distribution at multiple scales, which creates an extremely resistant and lightweight structure with a variable weight to area ratio of 6 to 10 kg/m2 – about ten times lighter than typical construction techniques with comparable mechanical performance. Beyond its technical features, the pavilion is an outstanding expression of a tectonic system conceived with and for 3D Printing, which enables multiple high-res optimisation logics with the precision of a tenth of a millimetre.
“The last decades have witnessed an exponential growth in the demand for raw materials due to the rapid urbanisation and industrialisation of emerging economies. This research looks at biological models and at the opportunities offered by the new additive production technologies in order to find sustainable solutions to the exploitation of materials. Our objective is to explore a new model of construction: advanced, efficient and sustainable,” says Roberto Naboni, Architect and currently Assistant Professor at University of Southern Denmark (SDU).