'Rock Print' in Reverse
John Hill
28. February 2016
Photo: Screenshot
Rock Print, a collaborative installation of Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich, and MIT's Self-Assembly Lab, was one of the highlights of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Beinnial. A short film presents its dusty deinstallation.
Billed as "the first architectural construction built by robotic machines using only rocks and thread, without any adhesive and mortar," Rock Print was exceptional for merging Fabio Gramazio and Matthias Kohler's experiments with robots with some fairly lo-tech techniques. That the leggy monolith was free of any glues, instead relying on friction and gravity, made it a sublime construction alongside the photos, drawings and models in the Chicago Cultural Center last year. Built with thread, Rock Print was deinstalled by unfurling the thread – a noisy affair shortened to two and a half minutes.