The ‘NCCR DFAB Heroes’ session gave the international audience an insight into the work of digital fabrication.

On the occasion of the IASS Symposium, Philippe Block talks to world-architects.ch about the thinking behind this year's conference theme: Redefining the art of structural design.

Conventional formworks are time-consuming, cost-intensive, and wasteful when used for optimised shapes. Prof. Ena Lloret-Fritschi and Fabio Amicarelli from her research group at the Accademia di Architettura - USI have developed a solution.

The assembly of the first level of Tor Alva marks a significant milestone for the project. The first eight prefabricated columns, each standing 3.4 meters tall, were seamlessly placed on the base, highlighting the benefits of modular construction.

NCCR Digital Fabrication Principal Investigator Marco Hutter wins ETH Zurich's most highly endowed research prize, the Rössler Prize. He and his team at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering are developing autonomous walking robots.

At the Zurich Innovation Conference, 150 experts from the construction industry and academia exchanged ideas about a future construction industry. The organisers, the NCCR DFAB and the Canton of Zurich, placed interdisciplinary exchange from design to fabrication at the heart of the event.

Over 100 participants from the fields of computational architecture, design and engineering took part in the first COMPAS Developer Day at ETH Zurich. They familiarised themselves with the new version COMPAS 2.0 and tried out some of the newly developed extension packages.

In a three day hands-onworkshop tutors from the NCCR DFAB, Carleton University, and ABB introduced researchers to COMPAS_RRC and ABB’s GoFa collaborative robot line. The workshop was part of the international ROB|ARCH 2024 conference in Toronto, Canada.

The individual Tor Alva elements are now being assembled into column modules in the Grison mountains. The Tor Alva is expected to be completed by the end of September 2024.

The ETH spin-off VAULTED AG was quietly founded in 2023. The founders, Prof. Dr. Philippe Block, Dr. Tom Van Mele and Dr. Francesco Ranaudo, want to offer the highest-quality prefabricated floor solutions for circular construction with VAULTED. This is all done with a strict geometry.