3D-printed bridge "combines historical wisdoms and trendy expertise"
The Striatus bridge makes use of historic masonry development methods and trendy expertise explains Zaha Hadid Architects affiliate director Shajay Bhooshan on this instalment of Dezeen’s Concrete Icons video collection produced in collaboration with Holcim.
The video options Striatus, a freestanding 3D-printed concrete footbridge designed to show how 3D printing methods can be utilized to construct with much less materials.
Talking to Dezeen in an unique video interview filmed at Zaha Hadid Architects’ workplace in London, Bhooshan defined how the bridge was constructed to showcase the capabilities of unreinforced concrete and computational design.
“Striatus demonstrates that combining historical wisdoms of masonry development, trendy applied sciences of design and engineering and 3D concrete printing, we are able to obtain a pathway to sustainable use of concrete,” he mentioned.
The arched bridge was constructed from 53 hole blocks, every printed from 500 layers of concrete ink, which took 84 hours to print.
The Striatus bridge was printed utilizing a six-axis robotic arm that may print non-uniform, non-parallel layers, which allowed for the printing of arched parts that can be utilized structurally.
The bridge makes use of historic masonry development methods to allow the load of the construction to be distributed with out the necessity for inner ancillary help, which suggests it’s held collectively totally by compression.
“Striatus is assembled the identical method as different historical masonry development, which absolutely engages the compression capacities by considering of concrete as a man-made stone,” Bhooshan mentioned.
The bridge is dry assembled with none glues, binders or mortar, which suggests it may be extra simply disassembled and recycled. As an alternative, it makes use of neoprene pads to manage friction and stress focus, in addition to exterior ties to soak up thrust pressure.
The shortage of adhesives and mortar imply the bridge has a decrease environmental footprint and improves its circularity.
“The masonry rules additionally assist it to be extraordinarily recyclable, as a result of it’s dry assembled, and there’s no metal to be separated out,” Bhooshan mentioned. “It may be dismantled and crushed and cleanly reused.”
Because the blocks used to make the bridge are hole, significantly much less materials was used.
“The concrete ink is deposited layer by layer,” he defined.
“You possibly can place materials solely the place it is wanted a bit like our bones, that are hole – there’s solely materials the place there’s forces flowing by it.”
Striatus was initially conceived for and put in within the Giardini in Venice, as a part of the Venice Biennale in 2021.
It was constructed by Block Analysis Group at Swiss college ETH Zurich and the Computation and Design Group at Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA CODE), in collaboration with concrete 3D printing specialists incremental3D.
Concrete Icons is a six-part video collection created in partnership with constructing supplies firm Holcim, which profiles probably the most putting up to date concrete buildings by the world’s main architects.
Earlier instalments within the collection give attention to MAD’s sinuous Cloudscape library in Haikou, China and The Broad museum by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.
Final week’s instalment focussed on The Sq., a studying centre comprised of stepping cubic volumes by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto.
The images is by Naaro except said in any other case.
Partnership content material
Concrete Icons is produced by Dezeen for Holcim as a part of a partnership. Discover out extra about Dezeen’s partnership content material right here.
Construct the icons of the long run with Holcim’s low-carbon ECOPact concrete, delivering as much as 90 per cent much less carbon dioxide emissions in comparison with normal concrete with no compromise on efficiency.
Discover out extra about how Holcim works with architects right here.
