Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Ehsan Baharlou
Climate transformations challenge the building industry to rethink the process of construction from the extraction of raw materials to building processes. Advances in design computation methods and manufacturing techniques provide new opportunities for architectural designers to consider new models for design and making. From an ecological perspective, the development of eco-friendly building materials with low embodied energy can help sustain the built environment. Robotic additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, facilitates the use of eco-friendly materials in building construction. This paper presents the potential of applying eco-friendly strategies in 3D printing soil-based materials to explore their novel tectonics and discuss the challenges of their integration in soil structures. Eco-friendly materials include materials with biodegradable and renewable characteristics, such as soil. In this paper, two case studies present novel approaches of 3D printing with soil-based mixtures to create eco-resilience structures. In the first case study, biopolymers, such as xanthan gum and guar gum, were added to the soil mixture to enhance its performance. In the second case, a living system was integrated within an ecologically active soil structure to improve the resilience of the printed soil. Robotic 3D printing was applied to deposit layers of soil-based ink, showcasing the potential of these eco-friendly strategies in creating novel mud tectonics.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.InterMaterialEco.23.44
Volume Editors
Caryn Brause & Chris Flint Chatto
