Size
3m x 3m x 3m
Location
Santralistanbul, Bilgi University, Istanbul
Date
August 2017
Collaboration
NOPA - Non Orthogonal Planar Assemblies - International Summer School was organized by Istanbul Bilgi University and was supported by ETH Zurich and NCCR Digital Fabrication from Switzerland. Program coordinators from Istanbul Bilgi University were Prof. Dr. Şebnem Yalınay Çinici and Dr. Evren Aysev Deneç. The tutors from Istanbul Bilgi University were Cemal Koray Bingöl, Gamze Gündüz and Leyla İlman including the collaborators, Oğul Öztunç and Hülya Oral. The tutors and lecturers from ETH Zurich and NCCR Digital Fabrication were Selen Ercan, David Jenny, Orkun Kasap and Luka Piskorec including the guest crits and lecturers Hannes Mayer from ETH Zurich and Dr. Ralph Bärtschi from ROB Technologies AG. The students of the International Summer School were Aylin Güler, Foad Sarsangi, Nilay Öztürk, Meryem N. Yabanigül, Mevan Bacgeroğlu, Emre Taş, Berk Ekmen, Bilge Kardelen Bekiroğlu, Derya Çiftnamlı, Parhes Deni Çakıridis, Deniz Hüray Tuğcu, Ecem Kırtaş, Saadet Yüncü, Semen Tanrıverdi, İlayda Turan, Hüsnü Yücel and İsmail Kocataş.
NOPA
The last ten years, in architecture there has been a huge amount of development in the knowledge transfer of robotics technologies to the construction field with a direct link of many research projects. As known, the construction industry is a conservative, uncontrolled and based on a manual labor field. Therefore research projects are very important to open a new relation between two world and need to support each other. On the other hand Turkey has just began to discover the potential of this new technology on the construction industry which has a big role in turkish economy. For the adaptation of the robotics technologies to the construction industry, the key process is education and research/Workshops. Therefor last year Bilgi University buy an industrial robot for the use of education and start the research the potential of the technology for the architectural use.
Between July 28th and August 4th 2017, Istanbul Bilgi University organised a summer school titled “Non-Orthogonal Planar Assemblies” (NOPA) together with researchers from ETH Zurich and the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication. The 2-week workshop explored design and fabrication strategies for the robotic cutting and assembly of standard timber elements for conventional construction techniques, to form continuous spatial structures without the need for complex joints. Following the initial design iterations, participants explored several jointing techniques and typologies using the computational design and fabrication setup tailored for the project and manually built full-scale mock-ups to physically test design iterations. Later, participants built the final design within 2 days by using the brand new robotic fabrication setup at Istanbul Bilgi University santralistanbul campus.
The topic chosen for the Bilgi International Summer School builds up on former research and teaching projects at Gramazio Kohler Research, ETH Zurich (Chair for Architecture and Digital Fabrication) on robotic spatial assembly using standard building elements. To exemplify, earlier investigations in the domain include the robotic spatial assembly of elements with circular profiles, orthogonal spatial assemblies of rectangular beam elements, the non-orthogonal spatial assembly of straight rectangular beam elements with complex joints and an earlier version of non-orthogonal planar assemblies of rectangular metal profiles, using chain-like aggregations.