[Image: “The Sphere” by Oliver Tessman, Mark Fahlbusch, Klaus Bollinger, and Manfred Grohmann].
The Bartlett School of Architecture has made all three volumes of Fabricate, their excellent series of books and conference proceedings dating back to 2011, free to download.
[Image: Matter Design’s La Voûte de LeFevre, Banvard Gallery (2012)].
More than 700 pages’ worth of technical experiments, speculative construction processes, new industrial tools, and one-off prototypes, the books are a gold mine for research and development.
[Image: Greg Lynn’s “Embryological House,” Venice Biennale (2002)].
3D printers, buoyant robots, multi-axis milling machines, directed insect-secretion, cellular automata, semi-autonomous bricklaying, self-assembling endoskeletons, drone weaving—it’s hard to go wrong with even the most cursory skimming of each volume, and that doesn’t even mention the essays and interviews.
[Image: “Custom forming tool mounted on the six-axis robotic arm,” via Fabricate 2014]
Download each book—from 2017, 2014, and 2011—and be prepared to lose a few days reading through them.