minijammed  is a three-week design and build assignment based on the ongoing research project Jammed Architectural Structures. The research focuses on the development of design and fabrication techniques to build fully reversible architectural structures by interlacing crushed-rock stones with textile string without any permanent bonding. The potential of the concept has been proven at architectural scale through the realisation of larger prototypes: Rock Print and Rock Print: A Manistone.

minijammed invites the students to explore the design possibilities and the rich solution space of the method in a smaller scale. The short-term project suggests a material-driven design and a robotic fabrication strategy, as only through the execution of multiple physical experiments, both manual and robotic, the designer is able to take informed decisions about the final outcome of the process. The projects were developed iteratively through series of physical prototypes, material tests, computational design and fabrication studies. The final results developed by the students conceptually enrich the scope of the research on granular materials by introducing topics such as: overhangs, voids, vertical textile reinforcements and post-tensioning, complex interwoven geometries, equilibrium of multiple elements.

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Related research:

http://gramaziokohler.arch.ethz.ch/web/e/forschung/275.html