Crealfa
Designing free-form buildings for construction by additive manufacturing.
Crealfa, for CREAtion de bâtiments de formes Libres par Fabrication Additive, applies the gains of 3D printing to building construction, and mainly to individual housing. Additive manufacturing already produces objects as varied as shoes, motorcycles, windows, medical prostheses and houses. It saves production time through automated robotic printing, it lowers both the cost of the object and its environmental cost by optimising the material used, and it relaxes the constraints on shape. Combined with structural optimisation, it can cut material input by up to 70 percent.
The originality of the approach is to rethink the dwelling as a whole, as a unique work, aiming for a free-form building that is neither standardised nor rectilinear, unlike most housing built today. Creating free forms in a building calls for research on the production chain itself, and above all on the computer-aided design of the digital model and on the mechanical simulation of what is designed. The project covers the definition of the overall architecture, the spatialisation of rooms inside it, and the habitability of non-planar shapes, with an emphasis on automating design to assist architects.
Models are then submitted to mechanical simulations, both numerical and physical, so that constructions hold over time and withstand weather. Analysing where a model reaches its limits feeds back into the design, so that viable shapes can be produced more reliably. The goal was a set of advanced design tools allowing strong architectural personalisation.
In practice the funding supported a single Master’s research internship.