Printing Out Buildings: R&Sie(n)'s Museum of Ice
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 12. 6.07
François Roche of French architecture firm R&Sie(n) (their invisible house here ) won the competition to build a new "museum of ice"- an art museum and alpine ice research station in Évolène, Switzerland. (We suppose like Joni Mitchell's Tree Museum, we are going to need Ice Museums). They are going to build it with a monster CNC machine in Lausanne, like stacking up a loaf of bread.
The Architects Newsletter says:
To build the museum, which is currently in design development, Roche plans to take 1,000 locally harvested trees, turn them into plywood, and mill them into fragments 2.5 meters wide by 7 meters long. These vertical “slices,” each 90 centimeters deep, will serve as the structural system, holding mechanical services within their depth. Assembled like a loaf of bread on site, the slices will be glued together with a resin system and wooden dowels (code-required concrete is used only in the elevator core). And it’s all generated directly from Roche’s computer model, which in turn drives the milling machine."
"Roche turned to a large-scale CNC facility run by the company Ducret-Orges, near Lausanne. Here, he found a five-axis machine originally developed to create components to restore the region’s medieval buildings. With a working area measuring 40 meters long and 5 meters wide, the machine could fabricate not just a model of the building, or small parts of it, but full-scale structural slices. “We discovered that we could produce an enormous piece,” Roche said. Moreover, the five-axis router allowed him to realize the computer-modeled design in its full ganglionic glory. “The jump to five-axis makes it all possible,” he added. “Three-axis machines simplified the shape. Now with five-axis you get the original shape itself.”
The eight-axis robot, top, at ETH’s digital fabrication studio in Zurich creates brick walls in custom patterns.
::R&Sie(n) and ::Architects Newspaper
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I AM NEW TO YOUR SITE AND ENJOY SITE SO FAR buti have a question about the artc. French architecture firm R&Sie
Whats green about cutting a 1000 tress and a all the huge energy eating equ to build a building with .
I have been building and designing Eco Friendly housing in Mexico with recycled Plastic Bottles for several years .Just wondered why call it green over even list it a environmental friendly product.
A friend of mine Berine Karl built a Ice Museum in Alaska using a old quince building and hot water that stays open year around now that energy eff. .check it out at www.chenahotsprings.com
What is done with all of the waste from this manufacturing technique? Like flat-pack - there is generally a lot of wasted material.
great design like 4D , and for human eye is very difficult to saturate it.
Not exactly what I'd call 3D "printing". Interesting, but misleading. And I'd ask the same question: what makes this especially "green"? Milling is usually a rather wasteful, subtractive process, whereas "printing" infers a more efficient additive process.
how can they waste all that good timber? i HATE that plywood crap. woulda been better leaving the trees where they where or at least as good strong planks of timber. and made the place normally.
PLEASE tell us what's green about this energy-expensive, wood-wasting (1000 trees!) procedure!!!!!!
this way to argue for a project is quite crappy and undeserving for a website like yours!
please pay attention and do not help to spread/promote projects like these in the internet in the future!
thanks & regards, flo
by the way: the design looks loke some ugly student's work of someone who just learned maya!
Another museum interesting and worthy to visit is the Louvre museum in France. Its collection includes artifacts from Napoleon’s raid into Egypt. You also can find drawings, plates, jewels, ceramics, glassware, and objects from the eighteenth century.