From the outside, it looks like a clean, modern social housing block. You can tell it’s new — there are 84 shiny solar panels on the roof and the fresh paint has barely dried on the walls. But it’s how this 56-dwelling building in Barcelona, complete with ground floor nursery, was designed and built that really matters.
“Our software is our superpower,” says Lucas Carné, co-founder of 011h, a construction tech firm, as he describes how his company has designed digital tools to help architects plan buildings like this one. “We use a lot of prefab,” he adds. “That reduces the need for on-site labour.”
Prefabricated construction relies on factory-made parts or components of buildings that are joined together on-site. It is far from a new concept but 011h has tried to make it much easier for architects to use this approach. The firm offers architectural software plugins containing libraries full of these prefab components. It makes the process of designing a building a bit like playing with digital Lego.
Improving productivity to solve housing shortage
So far, 011h has collaborated with architectural and construction firms on several Spanish apartment blocks of differing designs — roughly completing one such block per year. The company is now planning to scale up to multiple projects annually, encompassing a total of around 200 dwellings per year. The firm has raised more than 35 million euros to date and has 90 employees.
In videos like the one above, the bricklaying carried out by the robots seems rather slow but al Khafaji stresses that because the machine is able to keep working continuously without breaks, it is able to roughly match the average human bricklayer’s rate of 500 bricks laid per day.
Human in the loop still very much required
Automating specific activities such as this that can slot into traditional construction processes could help these technologies get adopted sooner, suggests O’Gorman. Though he notes that human oversight and finishing of tasks is still required. It may be a long time before we see robot builders working through the night with little or no supervision.
Still, Monumental’s robots have already helped to build among other things a canal retaining wall in Amsterdam and a one-storey villa. Demand is encouraging, says al Khafaji, indicating that he has orders for several new terraced houses on the books for the coming months. The firm is also exploring the potential of using more environmentally friendly bricks, since standard clay bricks contain a high amount of embodied carbon.
While Monumental’s bricklaying machines can’t yet place bricks standing vertically, or build arches, they can do curved corners and also lay bricks in artistic indented patterns.
“That’s really exciting to me,” says al Khafaji, “That gets beauty back into our built environment.”