Part 1 (Year 2): Project [ E.A.R.T.H.P.I. ] Experimental and Robotic, Technological, Hyper, Planetary, Intelligence

  • Hannah Ismail

This project asks about the possibilities of teaching self-automated robots to learn and store human knowledge of building construction and materials, the long-term aim is to test the feasibility of building new settlements in space. The work shown here reports on Stage One, which looks at the expansion of current building technologies on Planet Earth. Learning to use the most readily available materials of a planet will be a core skill for the builder-robots of the future. Currently, here on Earth, plastic is abundant and available and its non-biodegradable properties have made it a global issue, which is why I chose plastic as a material to begin training the builder-robots of the future. The growing production of disposable plastic products is today devastating the oceans and continents alike and has lead to the growing perception that plastic is a massive world problem. Although this is undoubtedly true, there has so far been little attempt to think positively and to ask how might it be possible to re-appropriate plastic and to celebrate it's versatility and durability? One place where plastic might be re-cycled on a large scale is in the building industry, where wasted plastic items could be transformed into construction materials and given architectural expression. To this end Stage One of project Earth PI proposes the F-GEB to be an enormous plastic building and processing plant. Not only will the F-GEB be a place where plastic re-cycling processes are researched, tried and tested, it will also itself be made entirely out of plastic - an enormous plastic body on the skyline of London. As such it will be an architectural statement on the scale of those enormous iron and glass display structures of the nineteenth century, such as the Crystal Palace, which introduced new sensations of space, new modes of building and ushered in new social relationships.