i3Dc – Session S3

From Earth to Mars and back: additive manufacturing of buildings in concrete

Prof. José P. Duarte
The Pennsylvania State University, Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, USA

Abstract:  World population growth and fast urbanization are such that we will need to build over the next twenty years as many houses as we have built in the past two thousand years. The talk will describe how innovative design and construction technologies developed to overcome this situation on Earth were used to design a habitat to support the human exploration of Mars. It will also show how the lessons learnt from this Martian effort may impact the way we design and make buildings on Earth. Finally, it will highlight the challenges and opportunities for the construction industry raised by the use of BIM, AI, and concrete printing.

Short Bio:  José P. Duarte (Lic Arch UT Lisbon 1987, SMArchS 1993 and PhD MIT 2001) is the Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation and director of the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing at Penn State, where he is Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, and Affiliate Professor of Architectural Engineering and Engineering Design. Dr. Duarte was dean of the Lisbon School of Architecture and president of eCAADe. He was co-founder of the Penn State Additive Construction Laboratory (AddCon Lab) and his research interests are in the use of computation to support context-sensitive design at different scales. Recently, he co-edited (with Branko Kolarevic) the book “Mass Customization and Design Democracy” (Routledge, NY, 2019) and his team was awarded 2ndplace in the finals of the “NASA 3D Printed Mars Habitat Challenge.”