Circular Experience
Walls made from reclaimed wood with a robotic arm.
Summary
Client: ABN Amro
Year: 2017
Status: completed
Location: Circl, Gustav Mahlerplein 1, Amsterdam.
Partners: IRS Robotics, Efectis
Recognition: FRAME Awards (nom.),
The Circular Experience fuses futuristic robotic fabrication with reuse of materials to deliver an interior that is as rich in expression as it is sustainable.
Our design for Circl’s interior walls consist of thousands of wooden strips, waste from the building’s construction, that’s made into a parametric design through a custom robotic fabrication process. The wall improves the acoustic performance and welcoming character of an otherwise austere entrance.
Combining high-tech and re-use.
Circl. A circular pavilion by ABN Amro.
Since decades, the ABN Amro bank was planning to build a pavilion outside its main office, a tall sleek office tower in Amsterdam’s financial district. As one of the largest real-estate banks in the Netherlands it felt the responsibility to take the lead in the transition towards a more sustainable, even circular, future of the construction industry. As part of this vision, they decided to build Circl , a multi-purpose, public pavilion (designed by Architecten Cie) built following the circular economy principles.
These principles dictate that through better design, maintenance, repair, reuse and recycling, products and buildings can last longer. This is a fundamental shift away from the traditional linear economy where products are disposed of after use.
Concept: closing the loop
ABN Amro asked RAP to rethink the aesthetics of sustainability (which had quite a dull reputation) and improve a specific part of the project: the underground entrance staircase leading into souterrain containing an art exhibition space and meeting rooms for employees.
After closer inspection, RAP noticed that the secondary entrance was used a lot by employees but only featured a bare concrete staircase and didn’t communicate the importance and sustainable spirit that Circl has. At the same time the discovery was made that a lot of waste material remained at the factory where the laminated load bearing structure had been made.
In line with the circular design paradigm that dictates that these ‘material loops’ should be closed we decided to design wall- and balustrade elements that would improve the acoustic performance of the space, would close the loop on this specific waste-stream but would also enhance the bank’s employees’ experience of the paradigm shift from linear to circular economy.
Waste? Materials.
As the main starting point of the design, the waste material was analysed. There were several thousands of larch and pine strips in a ratio of two to one. These strips had been discarded because they were too warped or bended or because they contained cracks, and couldn’t be processed into glue-laminated trusses.
As a first step, to reduce the absolute warping and bending per element, the strips were sorted, transported, dried and sawn into 30x40mm battens of 300 and 500mm long to within a tolerance of 0.5 mm.
Expressive detailing
With these material dimensions and quantity as a starting point, a design was made that would adapt to the floor, walls, staircase and handrail but would try to be as expressive as possible where it had space to do so. The design contains about 4000 vertical pine components and 6000 horizontal larch components.
Variation in multiple design variables generated a complex ornament that can only originate from the merging of parametric design and robotic manufacturing. For this purpose, a two-directional stacked component system was imagined, where components would become flush near the handrail of the staircase but would fan out the further away they got from this constraint. The pattern would fade out along the curved section of the wall as to end completely flat next to the entrance.
Make it.
With a recently acquired second hand ABB6400 robotic arm on a 5 meter track, pneumatic grippers and some peripheral machinery, it was possible to create these incredibly complex elements. It involved multiple sawing, drilling and dowel-placement actions for each element to be manufactured and put into place.
To maintain the required accuracy and stay within the production process size limits, the design was subdivided into 1200mm wide segments. These were assembled on-site.
Design for disassembly
After experimenting with tacking and glueing, which would require little peripheral machinery, the final detail was a bit more complicated. To adhere strictly to the principles of circular design, the battens are connected using glue-free dowel joints to guarantee its structural safety as a balustrade. Threaded metal rods are used to post-tension the separate wall- and balustrade elements after robotically stacking them.
This increased the stability and prevents that someone can pull off battens at the exposed sides of the elements. An added advantage was that, by only using glue-free joints and mechanical fasteners, the entire project can be taken apart after its functional lifespan into two separate material streams: around 10.000 wooden battens, 50.000 dowels and 150 metal rods.
Crash it and set it on fire.
Although being made entirely out of solid wood, which of itself pass the building code fire regulations, the Circular Experience had to be tested both structurally as a balustrade as well as on fire-resistance because of its inherent complexity. It had to comply to the highest fire-resistance class because of its location along an escape route.
Since it consists of thousands of unique wooden battens both its structural performance and fire resistance couldn’t be validated from a computational model. After many trial tests, the pine and larch needed to be both impregnated and coated with biobased fire-retardant to receive a permit. The load-testing proved much easier, with the thousands of dowels joints providing sufficient resistance to impact.
Concluding
The Circular Experience shows that, even though being a relatively small addition to the Circl pavilion, sustainability doesn’t have to be dull or boring and that it can thrive in relationship to new technological advancements.
It demonstrates the versatility of computational design and robotic fabrication to accommodate the imperfections of reclaimed natural timber to achieve a richness and expression that is uncommon in today's construction industry.
This project was realized at Studio RAP, which I co-founded and ran from 2014-2020.
All images are copyright © of Studio RAP.