Robotic Construction Can Help Us Design Better Buildings

Brief

Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic spoke to Archdaily about computational tools, the potential of robotic fabrication, as well as their academic work concerning digital construction technologies. Read the full interview below.

Insight

ANNAH Office is a US-based experimental research and design studio whose work focuses on advancing architecture and contemporary construction practices by examining the possibilities of new digital routines and fabrication technologies.

Selected as one of Archdaily’s Best New Practices of 2021, HANNAH Office was founded in 2012 by Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic and constitutes a platform for exploring technology and material methods across a variety of scales, from furniture to urbanism in search of new design outcomes.

ArchDaily: Can you tell us more about HANNAH and how digital fabrication came to underline your body of work?

HANNAH: HANNAH is an experimental design and research studio working across scales from furniture to buildings to urbanism. We have a keen interest in architectural concepts related to making, materiality, fabrication, and construction.

Those concepts are currently undergoing rapid transformations and paradigm shifts, fostered by technological, socio-economic, and cultural developments across the globe. We acknowledge that architecture’s processes of construction are rapidly changing and adapting to new realities.

At HANNAH, we intend to reclaim authorship over these new processes of construction that critically influence the way we currently can build – or perhaps ought to build in the future.

In collaboration with our research labs at Cornell University, HANNAH builds open-source construction machines, which affect how we think and design through making. However, we do not obsess over technology for technology’s sake: as designers, we consider ourselves to be biased generalists rather than specialists.