Robotic Building as Integration of Design-to-Robotic-Production & Operation

Abstract

While architecture and architectural production are increasingly incorporating aspects of non-human agency employing data, information, and knowledge contained within the (worldwide) network connecting electronic devices, the relevant question for the future is not whether robotic building will be implemented, but how robotic systems will be incorporated into building processes and physically built environments in order to serve and improve everyday life.

This issue of SPOOL aims to answer this question by critically reflecting on the achievements of the last decades in applications of robotics in architecture and furthermore outlining potential future developments and their societal implications. The focus is on robotic systems embedded in buildings and building processes implying that architecture is enabled to interact with its users and surroundings in real-time and corresponding design-to-production and –operation chains are (in part or as a whole) robotically driven. Such modes of production and operation involve agency of both humans and non-humans. Thus, agency is not located in one or another but in the heterogeneous associations between them and authorship is neither human or non-human but collective, hybrid, and diffuse.