Image courtesy of Storefront for Art and Architecture
On Pike Place between Division Street and East Broadway in New York City’s Chinatown, a robot is hard at work building what is being billed as the first full-scale, on-site digitally fabricated projects in the U.S. Pike Loop, an architectural installation by Zürich-based architects Gramazio & Kohler in partnership with the Faculty of Architecture at ETH Zürich and Storefront for Art & Architecture, combines technology often used in architecture and industrial design to quickly build prototypes of a final product with robotic fabrication methods used in the automotive and other precision industries. The difference here is that the so-called prototype is in fact the final product, and the fabrication is done not in a factory but on the spot.