masonry form

Overview

The project explores the use of a KUKA KR6 robotic arm equipped with a custom-designed gripper as the end effector for the construction of small-scale brick walls. The objective was to investigate how industrial robotic precision can be applied in architectural construction and prototyping to create complex geometries that would normally be challenging or time-consuming to build manually.

The robot’s movement and operation were controlled through Python-based scripting, which enabled full customization of both the brick placement sequence and the wall geometry. Both the parametric design logic and the robotic toolpath planning were programmed to allow flexible experimentation with wall forms.

Fabrication

The first wall uses a rotational placement strategy where each brick is rotate by plus or minus five degrees along the vertical axis. This creates a visual illusion of a curved wall within an otherwise straight wall. The rotation introduces subtle misalignments that generate dynamic shadow play and visual texture, challenging the perception of the wall’s flatness.

The second wall is a non-uniform circular structure, where the diameter changes incrementally along the height of the wall. This variation in diameter creates a twisting, organic form that reflects the robot’s capacity to adapt its placement path in real-time based on generative geometry input. With this design, the order of placing the bricks became very important so the robot did not hit the previously constructed portions of the wall.