The ashen cabin is a great example of that. This design transforms wood which is already considered useless or damaged into affordable and sustainable material which can be used for 3d cutting and printing. They use large logs, which are scanned to a high level of precision and then cut to the desired specifications for the build. This was done by using a robotic arm which sawed the wood into slices that would then be assembled piece by piece to create the outer shell of the house. Which you can see that makes up for most of the exterior structure or panels of the house.
Taking into consideration what concrete is also responsible to a tenth of the CO2 emissions released into the air, this design only uses concrete only where deemed absolutely necessary. Meaning that some of it was used to hold the structural integrity of the house such as the base, floor, and the prominent chimney in the exterior façade. The Ashen cabin is not the only project where they experiment with this. They have also used a similar method of creating small 3d printed structures from concrete in another project called the Corbel Cabin. They use the architectural method known as corbelling to fill the span of a space by printing the concrete into layers creating a 3d dimensional structure.
At the turn of this last century, we’ve seen great advancements in the technology that we use today in the realm of architecture. In other blogs we have shared with you the importance for practices like this to continue to research and improve on this technology. It is helping tremendously in the affordable housing and sustainability sectors. We are going to be able to use modular construction methods which will improve efficiency and even help with other projects as we have seen in the past weeks during this global pandemic. With the outlook of how the future might be affected economically and socially from our current situation, experimenting with technological affordances, fabrication methods, and new ways to use renewable materials is going to help the industry moving forward. Rethinking the future and the way in which projects are made can only be done if we widen our bases of initiation.
So, make sure that you go to their website and look at the different projects which they have been working on. If there are other cool projects out there which you would like to share you are always welcome to do so.
