With traditional building methods, structural stability is attained
through detailed preplanning and precise placement of components.
Is it possible to engineer
a
material that can produce its own
stability purely through interactions among the constituent parts,
without external intervention? Aleatory construction, an emerging
approach to this problem, uses randomly assembled elements that
autonomously
configure
to attain loadbearing capability. In physics,
the transformation from
a
loose collection of non-cohesive particles
into
a
disordered solid is referred to as the jamming transition, which
describes how micro-scale interactions generate macro-scale rigidity.
Generally this occurs through
confinement:
the available volume is
shrunk until there is not enough room for particles to rearrange, and
the aggregate locks up spontaneously. The autonomy of this jamming
process supplants preplanning, and the democratisation of design
at the scale of individual building blocks opens up the potential for
adaptability and recyclability beyond traditional methods. At the same
time the disorder and
configurational
ambiguity inherent to jamming
serves to introduce structural and textural complexity.
Aleatory construction applies these fundamental principles to
designing constituent elements ...
