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Nonprofiter seeks to help designers take on rapid prototyping
By Victoria Rivkin and Deborah Snoonian, P.E.

A wire-frame view of a study for a complex, tubular structural-steel member.

Dr. Kevin Rotheroe is not a traditional architect. Nor is his latest business venture a traditional one. Earlier this year, he formally established a nonprofit practice called the Freeform Research Studio, which he envisions building into a think tank for projects involving digital design, advanced manufacturing techniques, and mass customization.

Rotheroe, who has a Ph.D. from Harvard’s GSD and teaches at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is fluent in a number of rapid-prototyping methods for making models and mock-ups of building components. He’s more interested, however, in emerging large-scale fabrication methods, such as metal deposition used for making consumer products, that could form full-size components directly from computer models. “These technologies remove many of the formal constraints that existing manufacturing methods impose on designers,” says Rotheroe, a sentiment echoed by many of his peers.

In the past, he has worked with architects and software makers, such as Lord Norman Foster and Bentley Systems, to modify their existing methods and tools to make them suitable for digital manufacturing. He wants to bring these groups together with researchers, educators, students, and manufacturers so they can advance the state of the practice—hence the formation of his studio, which will be funded through a combination of research grants and contracts with private organizations. He hopes it can provide technology transfer that’s often missing in traditional research programs for design and construction.

Rotheroe modeled this complex roof with Bentley’s GenerativeComponents software.

Organic architecture has been one of the harbingers of the digital age, and Rotheroe is likewise interested in looking to nature for inspiration for new forms, which he calls biomimetic design. It’s not a new idea—Gaudí, among others, was doing this decades ago—but modern technology makes it easier and cheaper to model, analyze, and build such structures.

In a study Rotheroe conducted with the GSD, he designed and is seeking a patent for a complex system of metal tubular parts, similar to tree branches, that can be manufactured at full scale, shipped to a site, and assembled into a load-bearing building frame. The interiors of the tubes are strengthened and stiffened by 3D lattices of metal. The tubes are made by casting them onto foam models cut with a CNC milling machine, but the latticework has to be made separately and installed later. A future, unknown manufacturing technique may rectify this inefficiency.

It’s not just unique architecture that Rotheroe wants to enable through his research. “Nature uses materials very efficiently,” he notes. The potential end result is buildings that are strong, use less material, and are cheaper to construct—powerful selling points for designs of any stripe.

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