Embedding Ornament

Additive manufacturing technologies are foreseen to have drastic impacts on the construction and manufacturing capacities of the building industry. How does this new technology create new opportunities or challenges for architects? More specifically, via the premise of the studio, we ask how can extrusion-based additive manufacturing processes be used to design small scale architectural elements? Our exploration culminated in the design of two distinct elements—adaptable nozzles, and 80x10cm stackable units with straight and curved facets. The group’s research and design focused on using the machine to deposit and embed detail via the extrusion process, controlling the parameters based on observed effects, and designing a unit which showcased the properties of the material as the key design feature. After designing a set of nozzles, we then designed a stackable linear brick which had round and linear variations to show the textures changing according to the direction of print paths.