The University of Stuttgart has continued its experiments into biomimicry and robotic construction with two pavilions at the Bundesgartenschau horticultural show in Germany.
Both of the pavilions are built by robots and are designed to imitate nature ? known as biomimicry. A sweeping wooden pavilion has a shape based on sea urchins, while a fibre-composite pavilion takes its structure from beetle wings.
University of Stuttgart created two biomimetic pavilions, one from fibre-composite, at the Bundesgartenschau horticultural show
Researchers from the university built the BUGA Wood Pavilion from 376 unique plate segments that fit together like a jigsaw, with sub-millimetre precision.
The structure is based on the shell of sea urchins ? something Stuttgart's Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) and the Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) have been studying for almost a decade. The BUGA Wood Pavilion takes its form from the structure of sea urchins
Urchins have a distinctive skeleton made up of tightly interlocking plates, and the research groups have drawn on this repeatedly to build the likes of a small pavilion in 2011 and a stitched-together version in 2016.
For this iteration, the team wanted to outdo a direct precursor to this project ? the Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall from 2014, in which they'd interpreted the urchin morphology through finger joints.
The reusable pavilion spans 30 metres
Their goal was to use the ...