This volume investigates the challenges and opportunities for designing, manufacturing and operating off-Earth infrastructures in order to establish adaptive human habitats. The adaptive aspects are considered with respect to the development of adequate infrastructures designed to support human activities. Given the limitations in bringing materials from Earth, utilisation of in-situ resources is crucial for establishing and maintaining these infrastructures.

Adaptive on-and off-Earth Environments focuses, among other aspects, on the design, production, and operation processes required to build and maintain such off-Earth infrastructures, while heavily relying on In-Situ Resource Utilisation (ISRU). Such design, production, and operation processes integrate cyber-physical approaches developed and tested on Earth. The challenge is to adapt on-Earth approaches to off-Earth applications aiming at technology advancement and ultimately transfer from on- to off-Earth research. This challenge is addressed with contributions from various disciplines ranging from power generation to architecture, construction, and materials engineering involving ISRU for manufacturing processes. All chapters, related to these disciplines, are structured with an emphasis on computing and adaptivity of on-Earth technology to off-Earth applications and vice versa to serve society at large. ... Read more

Through a series of highly speculative contributions by both leading and highly acclaimed practitioners and theorists, this book gives a new comprehensive overview of architectures’ most recent practical and theoretical developments.

While a few chapters are mostly dedicated to a historical analysis of how we got to experience a new technological reality in architecture and beyond, all chapters – including the most forward looking, have in common their rigorous understanding of history as a pool of radical experiments, whether one speaks of the history of architecture, or of sociology, technology, and science.

Disruptive Technologies: The Convergence of New Paradigms in Architecture is required reading for anybody – student, practitioner, and educator – who wants to do serious research in architecture and all disciplines dealing with the shaping of our environment, beyond the important but restricted domain of computational architectural design. ... Read more

Sending humans to the Moon and Mars in the near future requires appropriate infrastructure to support and subsequently sustain human activities. This includes infrastructure to shield from environmental conditions, generate energy, and facilitate mobility and communication. Construction of such infrastructure aims to use in-situ resources and reduce the use of supplies from Earth. The establishment and maintenance of the required infrastructure, equipment, and hardware involves the development of adequate manufacturing techniques, which can enable maximal use of the local resources. Those techniques can be based on processing of local materials into construction materials, extraction of useful elements from local materials or in combination with materials brought from Earth. The required manufacturing techniques address the range of needs for sustained human activities, from smaller scale manufactured items to large built structures. The design of such structures is associated with a number of space systems’ engineering challenges, ranging from the accurate definition of all resource budgets (mass, volume, power, data) to the design of the interfaces between all subsystems making use of these resources. The interplanetary spacecraft used to transport the required materials (and eventually, crew) from Earth to the final site would probably need to be designed ad-hoc for this specific application, given its peculiar mass and volume constraints, especially in case a reusable concept is adopted. Other engineering aspects involved in the design of the infrastructure systems include the selection of an appropriate power generation approach and the definition of the radiation environment in order to provide sufficient shielding to the habitats. This Spool CpA #4 issue investigates challenges of designing, engineering, constructing, operating, and maintaining off-Earth infrastructure. ... Read more

This book offers an overview of the developments within robotics in architecture so far, and explains the future possibilities of this field. The study of interactions between human and non-human agents at building, design, production and operation level will interest readers seeking information on architecture, design-to-robotic-production and design-to-robotic-operation. ... Read more

Digital technology has introduced in the last decades data-driven representational and generative methodologies based on principles such as parametric definition and algorithmic processing. In this context, the 15th Footprint issue examines the development of data-driven techniques such as digital drawing, modelling, and simulation with respect to their relationship to design. The dynamics between data-driven processes and design, as well as the impact of these processes on artistic and architectural production, is addressed in 5 papers from authors with diverse backgrounds in media studies, art, and architecture. From theoretical explorations discussing cultural swarming techniques and data-driven design representation and materialisation aspects to practical (artistic and architectural) experimentation, this issue indicates the increasing convergence of computational and material systems. Furthermore, it addresses the generation of multiple, emergent results from one and the same computational representation – results that may be realized virtually at the level of design conceptualization, physically at the level of production, and even operationally at the level of artefact or building use where users or the environment contribute to the emergence of multiple physical configurations and outcomes. Data-driven design thereby establishes an unprecedented design to production to operation feedback loop. ... Read more

Similar to the way that industrial fabrication with its concepts of standardisation and serial production has influenced modernist architecture, digital fabrication influences contemporary architecture: While standardisation focused on processes of rationalisation of form, mass-customisation as a new paradigm that replaces mass production, addresses non-standard, complex designs based on non-Euclidean geometries. Furthermore, knowledge about the designed object can be incorporated at the level of its connectivity with data stemming not only from its geometry but also from its content and behaviour within an environment. Digitally-driven architecture implies, therefore, on the one hand, digitally designed and fabricated architecture, and on the other hand, it implies architecture controlled and actuated by digital means. In this context, the sixth Footprint-issue is examining the influence of digital means on architecture as pragmatic and conceptual instruments for exploring and generating complex systems of spatial organisation as well as for constructing and actuating architecture. The focus is not only on computer-based generative systems for the development of architectural designs, but also on architecture incorporating aspects of digital sensing/actuating mechanisms that enable buildings to interact with their users and surroundings. ... Read more