Francois Roche of French architecture firm R&Sie(n) won the competition to build a new “museum of ice”- an art museum and alpine ice research station in Évolene, Switzerland. The next step of the project would be to build it with a monster CNC machine in Lausanne. The mechanism, to put it very simply, would be similar to stacking up a loaf of bread.
The Architects Newsletter describes in minute detail how Roche would go about building the museum. The first raw material he would need is 1000 locally harvested trees. The following step would be to turn them into plywood, and mill them into fragments 2.5 meters wide by 7 meters long. These vertical “slices,” each 90 centimeters deep, will serve as the structural system, holding mechanical services within their depth and will be glued together with a resin system and wooden dowels. The operation runs from Roche’s computer model driving the milling machine.
In Lausanne, Roche found found a five-axis machine originally developed to create components to restore the region’s medieval buildings. With a working area measuring 40 meters long and 5 meters wide, the machine could fabricate not just a model of the building, or small parts of it, but full-scale structural slices.
Roche is sounding very positive about the project. If everything turns out well, it is surely going to make a sight!
Via: Tree Hugger
