Ioanna Mitroupolou, Alexander Enz & Matteo Lomaglio, Photo credit: Tom Mundy

Smart FDM Formwork  is a four-week-long focus project where the MAS students are encouraged to critically challenge the topic of geometric freedom for formworks and, implicitly, for concrete architecture in general. How do we exploit the unprecedented design freedom in concrete  promised by the advent of large scale 3D printing fabrication processes? We investigate functional features that can be integrated in the formwork and how these features can have a benefic impact on the concrete components.

The aim of 3D printed formworks is to expand the potential of concrete for free-form architecture. The unconstrained fabrication/geometric freedom of the formwork is inherited by the concrete components which rely on fibre-reinforcement to maximize their load-bearing capacity.

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Related research: http://dbt.arch.ethz.ch/research-stream/free-formwork/

Georgia Chousou, Haruna Okawa & Yao Wang, Photo credit: Tom Mundy