Just over 50 years ago, a constant was introduced that fundamentally changed our view of the world. In 1977, LEGO® figures entered children’s bedrooms for the first time.
The previously abstract world of the interlocking bricks, which had been popular since the 1960s, suddenly had a fixed scale. The ‘Vitruvian LEGO® Man’ is four bricks high. Without even realising it, children and adults alike have since viewed LEGO® constructions at a scale of 1:45. Whether in free play or "Serious Play" - such as the Porocity project by architect Winy Maas at The Why Factory - we are always imagining ourselves into miniatures.
Around 15 years ago, the spread of digital manufacturing methods in architecture sparked a renewed interest in high levels of detail for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, making it affordable without the need for intensive manual craftsmanship. Using 3D printing and CNC processes, architects like Hansmeyer/Dillenburger are creating architectures that are far more expressive than those of the Gothic or Baroque periods. However, this high-resolution architecture, where every cubic centimetre is designed, still follows the paradigm of a perfect, unalterable architecture, where material is bound into a single form for eternity.
If one entangles the world of cubic-centimetre bricks with the idea of high-resolution architecture, the result is a reversible construction system that allows for maximum design freedom and can be assembled, dismantled, and rebuilt almost infinitely. In concrete terms, this leads to an architecture where LEGO® bricks are not seen as miniatures, but function as a 1:1 spatial mosaic within the architecture itself.
Roughly five years ago, the Department for Digital Methods in Architecture (dMA) at Leibniz University Hannover acquired 150,000 interlocking bricks - equivalent to LEGO® Type 3001 (2x4) - to research the construction, robotic assembly, and design of reversible architectures. Since then, numerous pieces of furniture and architectural components have been realised at a 1:1 scale using these bricks. Based on the concept of Digital Materials the department has developed its own reversible building blocks in various materials, specifically suited for the robotic assembly of structures. These are executed by a collective of "relative robots" that move autonomously across the structure they are building. With VRoxel, a bespoke design and simulation environment was developed, allowing architectures consisting of millions of blocks to be edited in full resolution and in real-time within VR.
To make one final shift in perspective: dMA is working on the scaling up of nanorobots. Novel interlocking bricks serve as the molecules of an architecture that evolves over long periods-tiny building blocks that are used over and over again and can represent any form or function. The constructions are in a state of flux; the molecules are permanently in circulation.
