Robotically Fabricated Structure (RFS) has been awarded the Jury’s Choice Award for the 2023 Wood Design & Building Awards program! The Canadian Wood Council organizes the Wood Design & Building Awards, which “recognizes and celebrates the outstanding work of architectural professionals around the world who achieve excellence in wood design and construction.”
There were 181 nominations from 25 countries submitted this year, and RFS is one of twenty-four winning projects selected. Susan Fitzgerald, design principal at FBM and one of the jurors for the award, remarked that RFS “combines the artful and experimentation,” putting together a structure that is “quite delightful and beautiful.” Winning projects will be featured in the summer issue of the Wood Design & Building magazine and the book Celebrating Excellence in Wood Architecture.
RFS was created by Arash Adel, assistant professor of architecture, his team at ADR Laboratory, and the students of the University of Michigan’s Taubman College M.S. in Digital and Material Technologies program. RFS is a robotically fabricated timber pavilion that explores responsible and precise methods contributing to sustainable and low-carbon construction outlooks. This structure is designed with the help of custom algorithms developed specifically for this project and built through state-of-the-art human-robot collaborative construction. The coupling of custom algorithms and robotic fabrication enables the feasible realization of bespoke building components that are otherwise difficult or costly to achieve through conventional means and methods, with minimal construction waste. Moreover, short elements enable the use of indigenous trees that cannot easily produce full-length building elements (typically eight-foot dimensional lumber), construction and manufacturing off-cuts, and lumber elements reclaimed from the deconstruction of buildings, ultimately contributing to a more sustainable practice. The integrated digital design and construction process for RFS is a novel approach to reconsidering issues of material use, labor, and the environment to create intelligent and resourceful architecture with striking expressive qualities.
You can view the winners of the Wood Design & Building Awards here: https://cwc.ca/en/be-inspired-to-build-with-wood/wood-design-building-awards/