I joined the brilliant Architectural Association’s D-LAB for an intensive project with lots of scripting and robotic fabrication. At the time, the lab’s research was on robotic fabrication, specifically robotic single-point incremental forming (known lovingly as SPIF), whereby the robot’s tool and tool path slowly apply force curve by curve to a single curve at a time to incrementally form sheets of a given material. In this case, that material was none other than the readily available standby, zinc.

The challenge of working with zinc is how soft it is; yet, that is a perfect condition for testing whether we could utilize SPIF to make sheets into rigid panels — and whether they would be quite so rigid as to build a panelized pavilion with it. Herein I made my greatest contribution — second only to what I contribute in always motivating my fellow designers and builders — that utilizing bubbles/ clustered bubbles for the geometries for SPIF would create arches whereby the forces would create rigidity. More, one could control rigidity in different areas by clustering them either closer or farther apart.