As part of their contribution to the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial, Skidmore Owings & Merrill has teamed up with the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning on the design of a robotically fabricated timber pavilion. 

The project is the result of a year’s worth of research by Taubman Professors Tsz Yan Ng and Wes McGee and is meant as a showcase for the power of robotics to produce efficient and sustainable methods of design and construction. 

“Automated manufacturing technologies enable us to precisely and efficiently prefabricate a kit of parts which can be delivered to the construction site on demand, leveraging skilled labor where it is most effective in the process,” Ng and McGee said in a statement.

The processors report that the Spatial Laminated Timber (SLT) they used reduces up to 46% of material use when compared to more traditional CLT methods. Timber has, in general, been seen as a sustainable alternative to many carbon-exhaustive building materials, something the team aims to highlight with its prototype of a single-story framing (called SPLAM) that it hopes will become widely adopted in the future.

“Weaving together timber beams like threads in fabric, SPLAM explores the idea of using smaller pieces of wood than conventional mass timber construction systems,” SOM’s Scott Duncan said of the pavilion design. “Doing so means that the wood can be sourced from more rapidly renewable forests, or, in theory, even from the salvaged components of de-constructed buildings."

The exhibition will be open to the public every Saturday until December 31st. The pavilion will serve as host to a series of performances before transitioning to its permanent role as a learning space for EPIC Academy’s South Shore campus.