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Robotic Landscapes

Designing the Unfinished

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Dynamic robot-based planning and execution tools open up previously inconceivable design possibilities in the landscape architecture of the 21st century


English edition
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Title Details
Edited by Ilmar Hurkxkens, Fujan Fahmi
2022
Paperback
208 pages, 22 color and 187 b/w illustrations
17 x 24 cm
ISBN 978-3-03860-254-5

The Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich has been researching the integration of robots into the architectural practice, both in design and the fabrication process, for some time. This book—created in collaboration with the chair of Christophe Girot, Gramazio Kohler Research, and Marco Hutter at ETH Zurich’s Robotic Systems Lab—is the first to investigate the use of robot-based construction equipment for large-scale soil grading in landscape architecture. As landscapes are continuously changing due to ever-changing environmental conditions, the application of autonomous systems that respond to the environment rather than perform predefined and static earthwork is of particular interest in this field.

Robotic Landscapes sheds light on a series of groundbreaking experiments in an interdisciplinary collaboration of landscape design, environmental engineering, and robotics that aims to make landscape architecture sustainable and ecological in the long term.

Echo
“Through a broad, multidisciplinary series of academic essays, the book brings both rigorous science and wide-ranging philosophy to its examination of autonomous robotics in landscape design. […] The book itself is remarkably beautiful, with a design that commits to a series of subtle off-white rectangles printed across each double-page spread, with text and images placed within, between, and across this unique grid structure. The binding uses a drop-spine-style dust jacket for stability, while laying open beautifully on its own during reading. The images shift subtly from photographs to illustrations and back, and like the text serve to unite the conceptual with the practical. The prospect of accelerating climate-based crises is grim enough on its own; that the project approaches its subject with such a heightened aesthetic is testament to the desire to unify art and science in a common goal.” John Peck, Degraded Orbit

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