Revolutionizing the construction industry with a low-cost, sustainable alternative to traditional formwork methods.
Builders pour concrete into temporary molds called formwork. However, this process can be costly and time-consuming. MIT researchers have developed a method to use lightly treated mud, including soil from a building site, as the “formwork” molds into which concrete is poured.
A Low-Cost Alternative to Traditional Formwork
The technique deploys 3D printing and can replace the more costly method of building elaborate wood formworks for concrete construction. According to Sandy Curth, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Architecture who has helped spearhead the project, “What we’ve demonstrated is that we can essentially take the ground we’re standing on, or waste soil from a construction site, and transform it into accurate, highly complex, and flexible formwork for customized concrete structures.”
Reducing Costs and Carbon Emissions
The approach could help concrete-based construction take place more quickly and efficiently. It could also reduce costs and carbon emissions. “It has the potential for immediate impact and doesn’t require changing the nature of the construction industry,” says Curth, who doubles as director of the Programmable Mud Initiative.
A Breakthrough in Shape Optimization
The EarthWorks method allows architects and engineers to create customized concrete shapes more easily, due to the flexibility of the formwork material. It is easier to cast concrete in an unusual shape when molding it with soil, not wood. “What’s cool here is we’re able to make shape-optimized building elements for the same amount of time and energy it would take to make rectilinear building elements,” Curth says.
A Collaborative Effort
As Curth notes, the projects developed by the Programmable Mud group are highly collaborative. He emphasizes the roles played by both Sass, a leader in using computation to help develop low-cost housing, and Mueller, whose work also deploys new computational methods to assess innovative structural ideas in architecture.
A Future of Sustainable Construction
While finishing his doctorate at MIT, Curth has also founded a firm, FORMA Systems, through which he hopes to take the EarthWorks method into the construction industry. Using this approach does mean builders would need to have a large 3D printer on-site. However, they would also save significantly on materials costs, he says.
In either case, Curth says, as formwork for concrete or by itself, we now have new ways to apply soil to construction. “People have built with earth for as long as we’ve had buildings, but given contemporary demands for urban concrete buildings, this approach basically decouples cost from complexity,” Curth says. “I guarantee you we can start to make higher-performance buildings for less money.
