Cold Production: Programming Concrete Openwork with Ice Formwork

Cold Production explores a zero-waste fabrication method for concrete that uses digitally sculpted ice as a moulding material. The project explored spatial concrete lattices and their stacking principles.
Ice units were press-formed using 3D-printed multiparty moulds. The rapid and waste-free production is done in the Sub-Zero lab at -10C. The concrete was poured, cured, and the next day the elements were placed outdoors for demoulding by simply letting ice melt away, revealing its intricate concrete lattice design.
Customised computational tools were used from design to fabrication. The geometric pattern based on a dodecahedron honeycomb and the principle of its subdivision allowed to produce 24 module combinations with only 6 types of ice units. The design tools were then used to maximise the variability of the lattice structure and to control the local and global densities of the lattice.
Artificial reality interfaces were also developed for the project workflow. Firstly, to support the design process, AR tools were developed to provide immersive visualization of the design in progress. Secondly, due to the complex reuse of the same moulds to create diverse variations, augmented reality headsets were integrated to support the manual assembly in the refrigerated environment of the lab.
The fabrication of the 15 unique lattice modules required the processing of 8400 kg of ice. For such a large scale of production, the raw material was sourced from a local ice rink. Ice abrasion is a common by-product of the regular resurfacing of the ice rinks. The reuse of ice for fabrication purposes allows an increase in the production speed and dramatically minimizes the energy consumption of the process.
The intertwined geometries of the concrete elements were assembled in a continuous structure. Based on the research Ice Formwork, this project opens the potential of ice to cast concrete in topologically challenging forms.
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Cold Production is designed by students of the Master in Advanced Studies in Architecture and Digital Fabrication 2021-2022 at the ETH Zurich and is based on research at the chair of Digital Building Technologies.
Master of Advanced Studies ETH in Architecture and Digital Fabrication:
www.masdfab.com/
The chair for Digital Building Technologies ETHZ Zurich
dbt.arch.ethz.ch/
Ice Formwork research project:
iceformwork.com/
Design Development MAS DFAB 21-22 Students:
Vasileios Aloutsanidis, El Mehdi Belyasmine, Ananya Kango, Che Wei Lin, Wenjun Liu, Erika Marthins, Nikolaos Maslarinos, Gabriele Mattei, Andrea Victoria Mendoza, Chris Norcross, Muslima Rafikova, Joaquin Tobar Martinez, Katarina Toumpektsi, Jingwen Wang, Ming Yang Wang, Vincent Wörndl, Hanbing Zhao
Teaching Team Digital Building Technologies:
Vasily Sitnikov (Project lead), Remy Clemente, Wenqian Yang (Project lead AR), Lena Kitani, Beril Önalan, Ko Tsuruta; Yael Ifrah (MAS ETH DFAB coordination, Digital Building Technologies).
Scientific support:
Daniela Mittenberger (GKR)
Technical support:
Tobias Hartmann, Andreas Reusser, Michael Lyrenmann
Documentation (MAS DFAB students):
El Mehdi Belyasmine, Erika Marthins, Gabriele Mattei, Chris Norcross, Joaquin Tobar Martinez, Katarina Toumpektsi
Supported by:
Sportanlage Heuried, Stadt Zürich
Holcim (Schweiz) AGPCI Bauprodukte AG