While many of Mamou-Mani’s projects involve 3D printing, he is not convinced by the additive manufacturing approach that many are predicting for the construction of houses and other similar structures.





“I think with 3D printing there are so many attempts to do homes, 3D printing the first home. I don't think that there's a place that someone lives in that has been 3D printed, I think there are conceptual ones,” he says.





“I'm not sure that extruding in concrete for I don't know how much time to create a building is the solution. I think we've been so used to working with different kinds of materials: timber, bricks, stone, that suddenly extruding plastic, which means not only revolutionising the machines that build it but also the material is so much revolution that it's going to be a bit longer.”





Instead, he has been integral to the development of an alternative approach to digitised construction, which in its current early form is being showcased in ARUP’s head office in London.





“I got in touch with ARUP, they do a competition every year to promote young designers in their atrium, and we suggested to build not the design, but to build the machine around the design, the machine that creates the design,” he explains.





“We've always used digitial fabrication tools in our studio, but we're always limited to that kind of scale and that kind of material – plastic mainly, or wood, but in the form of subtractive technology, not additive – so the solution, I think, would be in between a spidercam and a 3D printer: it's called a cable robot, in this case we called it the Polibot.”





In its showcase at ARUP, the Polibot picks up materials and places them piece by piece to form a tower, before dismantling it and starting again. A one-of-a-kind construction tool, it was created entirely by Mamou-Mani and his colleagues using a combination of 3D printing and laser-cutting, and is equipped with 3D vision using an off-the-shelf Microsoft Kinect.





“It's a crane. It's really just a crane, but it's a robotically controlled crane so it allows people like us that are trained in digital fabrication to scale up to buildings, and really I think that's the biggest challenge, at least for me, is scaling up to the building scale,” explains Mamou-Mani.





“Because of its complexity, because of what we're building and the tolerances, it has what's called a feedback loop, it goes and reads itself and autocorrects when there is a problem. So I really hope this will mean the future of construction.”





At present the robot is neither large enough, nor working at the level of granular detail that would be required, for it to construct complex, full-scale buildings. However, it is impressive for such an early version, and clearly has the potential to develop into a full-scale tool for construction with adequate time and refinement.





“I think there's still a tolerance of around 2cm, plus or minus, which is ok because the timber pieces, they expand on both sides, so even if its 2cm in or out it doesn't create a massive problem. What’s really, really important now, especially at that scale, is the idea of machine learning and self-correction and feedback loops,” he says.





“Because we're sending the information from Grasshopper directly to the robot, we can establish a kind of feedback loop with things like Kinect and so the Grasshopper will read that the piece hasn't been picked at the right spot or its slightly off, so we can tell the computer to autocorrect the code and then place it at the right spot.





“But it still requires really precise 3D scanning, and I think that technology is not yet completely affordable. The Kinect is the closest we can get to a precise thing, but it's still a massive challenge.”





This, however, hasn’t stopped Mamou-Mani from looking at how the tool can be used to construct a full-scale building. He had hoped to use the Polibot to build London’s Holocaust Memorial, which Mamou-Mani’s algorithmic design was shortlisted for, but ultimately the firm lost out to David Adjaye and Ron Arad.





Nevertheless, the idea attracted considerable support, particularly from the project’s structural engineer Francis Archer, and so it is likely to be only a matter of time before the construction robot finds its first full-scale project.





“He pushed that robot as well because he also thinks that it will have an impact on the construction industry,” says Mamou-Mani of Archer.