Aleatory Architectures: the bright future of self-assembling granular materials

2015-11-10T20:30:00-05:00

But some designers are toying with another idea—that there’s a different way to build that exploits randomness rather than avoids it. This kind of building will rely on new kinds of granular materials that when tipped into place, bind together in ways that provide structural stability. [...] Sean Keller at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and Heinrich Jaeger at the University of Chicago explain how this kind of “aleatory architecture” is finally becoming possible.

That will have a profound effect on the process of design. “As a result, preplanning is freed from considering the local structural detail,” say Keller and Jaeger. “Instead, the main task now becomes generating the proper particle shapes as well as the overall boundary and processing conditions to guarantee that the desired target structure will be mechanically stable when realized.”

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Aleatory Architectures: the bright future of self-assembling granular materials