PRINT!Architecture

Turning ideas into successful and disruptive technologies is an extremely context-sensitive process. Place, time, resources, and parallel innovations in adjacent fields need to fall together to ignite innovation. This book portrays such a moment in time when Additive Manufacturing (AM) made the leap from the scale of product design to the dimension of entire buildings. Within a few years, AM matured from basic research to industrial applications in the Built Environment. The Built Environment – Additive Manufacturing (BE-AM) symposium, organized by the editors of this book, has been accompanying and moderating this process since 2015. The series of events did not only show the immense velocity of development, but it also revealed the vast amount of ingredients that need to be part of the recipe. This book seeks to shed light on those ingredients and how they together form novel technologies.

While the presented projects in this book are witnesses of their time, they also form nodes within a larger network that spans over time, place, disciplines, technologies, and the demands of a broader socio-economical context. The time has come for AM to enter and disrupt the fields of architecture, engineering, and construction. This book aims at telling the stories and presenting the demonstrators, prototypes, and finally the projects that paved the road for an idea turning into a technology.