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Visitors at dusk around a pavilion of slender concrete columns and thin slabs lit warm from below, in front of the Vitra Design Museum
Photo: Erika Marthins

Eggshell Pavilion

Vitra Design Campus, Weil am Rhein, Germany · 2022 · Gramazio Kohler Research and MAS ETH DFAB, ETH Zurich

Four concrete columns and four ribbed slabs, cast in thin formwork that a robot 3D printed from recycled plastic.

The Eggshell Pavilion was designed and built in ten weeks by students of the Master of Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication. Each column and slab was cast in a thin formwork, robotically 3D printed from plastic, that held the fresh concrete as it set: an approach for building complex concrete shapes without conventional moulds. The pavilion was exhibited for six months at the Vitra Design Campus.

How COMPAS was used

The printing toolpaths for the formwork were generated with COMPAS Slicer, the open-source COMPAS package for slicing geometry into robotic print paths, and sent to the robotic arm with COMPAS RRC.

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