"Sustainable construction needs to be fully automated": Gilles Retsin leads visiting studio at D-ARCH
The Belgian architect and tech-entrepreneur wants to make sustainable housing accessible to everyone. His startup AUAR aims to reshape the design and manufacturing process of housing with robotic micro-factories.
Originally from Belgium, Gilles Retsin studied architecture in Belgium, Chile and the UK, where he graduated from the Architectural Association. He obtained his PhD from RMIT in Australia. In 2013 he founded his architecture office in London, and in 2022 together with Mollie Claypool he co-founded Automated Architecture (AUAR), a technology startup. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. He has co-edited the book “Robotic Building: Architecture in the Age of Automation”. Retsin is an associate professor at UCL, the Bartlett School of Architecture.
Retsin is questioning the building blocks of architecture itself. He developed a method for the assembly of precisely defined, repeating parts. His work combines ideas from industrialised construction with digital design. For the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017 he built a pavilion, whose building blocks could be assembled into a variety of structures like LEGO. In 2019 the architect designed the installation “Real Virtuality” for the Royal Academy in London, combining timber construction with Augmented Reality and automation. "I am more interested in the question of an architecture that can repeat itself in large amounts rather than in unique one-off's", Retsin explains. Architects need to think in large quantities, to respond to the climate crisis and the housing crisis, he is convinced. "This requires a new architectural agenda that can support scale and speed while also remaining culturally relevant."
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Pavilion for the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017. (Photo: NAARO) -
Installation “Real Virtuality”, 2019, Royal Academy London (Photo: NAARO)
His startup AUAR has developed a timber frame panel system, a portable robotic micro-factory and a software platform for design and manufacturing. The company collaborates with developers, architects and builders, who use the technology of the startup to create sustainable and affordable homes on a large scale. "The biggest question is how to scale sustainable construction so that it has an actual impact on the built environment", the architect explains. This requires both automation and new business models and modes of collaboration with the industry. "We can't think about sustainable construction as a form of small-scale craft, it needs to be fully automated so that it becomes more affordable than current construction."
Retsin’s studio at the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) will also investigate architecture in large quantities. Students will be asked to develop spatial ideas, timber tectonics and systems to develop designs for thousands of homes, all at once. “We will primarily use prefabricated timber-frame construction and collaborate with the Lectureship in Building Technology and Construction BUK on developing technical depth to support mass-production, sustainability and circular design”, the architect says. The studio is relevant considering the global housing and climate crisis, but also in the context of architects questioning their modes of practice, business model and use of labor. “How do we work?”, asks Retsin. “What does our creativity mean in the context of the automation of creative work? What are we good at, what would we rather not do?”
Visiting studios
Every year the Department of Architecture invites six visiting studios, that teach design for one to four semesters. They are selected by the institutes with the involvement of the professors, the mid-level academic staff and the students. In the fall semester, in addition to the landscape architect Céline Baumann and the architects Oliver Lütjens and Thomas Padmanabhan, the department is welcoming the ZAS* association, the architect Lillit Bollinger, the architect Gilles Retsin and Anja Beer and David Merz from the Beer Merz architecture office as design guests.