The New Architecture of Phase Change MANIPULATING USING TRADITIONAL AND DIGITAL METHODS

Pieter Sijpkes and David Theodore School of Architecture, McGill University

The paper presents speculative avenues for constructing 3-D ice models at various scales using traditional fabricating methods and modern CNC and rapid-prototyping techniques. Canada has a long history of using ice and for the construction of houses (), ice palaces, and ice roads, in some cases dating back thousands of years. These techniques will be reviewed and evaluated for their suitability in modern uses. Computer-driven ice imaging and production methods present many opportunities and challenges. On the software side, we will speculate on how to use parametric software for form-fi nding; on the hardware side, we will refl ect on how to translate these models into task planning for ice-building machines. Initially, these machines will be off-the-shelf robots and rapid prototyping machines, but we envision using specially constructed “cold irons,” “re-icing” robots, and automatic “ice bricklaying” machines. Vapour deposition on a substrate is envisioned as well. An overview of the design and adaptation of delivery systems, through drip or spray nozzles, as well as methods of cooling water through natural or artifi cial means will be given. The role of additives (for colour and / or strength) will be outlined.

32 ACADIA 2007 THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF PHASE CHANGE Pieter Sijpkes, David Theodore

INTRODUCTION and the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s Center This paper outlines an experimental project for the for Intelligent Machines, includes Prof. Jorge Angeles, design and construction of ice architecture at various an expert in robotics; subsequently, some of our trials scales, partly inspired by the long history of harness- also involve using material delivery systems attached ing phase change processes in other materials. Our to robotic arms, or using larger robots as construction three-year study, builds on a history of ice architecture workers that mimic the movements of human bricklay- in Canada, in Quebec (Figure 1) and in particular at ers. Ultimately, we hope to invent techniques that will McGill University.1 Since 1971 we have experimented inspire others to create sculptural and architectural with building nylon reinforced hyperbolic paraboloid (inhabitable) works, and deliver them to a broad and shells, catenary arches, and pisé-work domes out of ice. interested public, designers and lay people alike. We propose to add modern computer driven modeling and production methods to the age-old skill of snow PHASE CHANGE AS A MANUFACTURING PROCESS and ice construction. The three basic methods for creating form in compu- Our project literally proposes building a house, or a ter-controlled fabrication are subtractive, additive and room, or an , as easily as we dispense formative (moulding) processes.3 All three have workable cones or make architectural models using analogues for ice architecture: traditional ice sculpting rapid prototypers. Ice architecture has strong poten- with chisels corresponds to a subtractive process, while tial for further formal and technical development even natural formation and building from ice blocks beyond the speculative research plan we propose here, are additive; everyone who has ever made a snowball or given the current understanding of the material and a snowman knows about formative processes. But most computational possibilities: software + hardware + mate- signifi cant for ice is the possibility of manipulating rial. CNC milling of ice, for example, has tremendous phase change, from vapour or liquid to . business potential in the commercial ice sculpture indus- Induced phase change in manufacturing is a very old try. A Volkswagen Polo Twist, was CNC-sculpted from process. It has been applied to many diff erent materials. blocks of ice for a celebrated “guerrilla ad” in London, For example, a gelatin mould is a simple device that, England, in 2004.2 Note that for us rapid prototyping is combined with temperature manipulation, will form a generic term meant to include all manner of methods liquid gelatin into a self-supporting solid. Until the for transforming 3-D computer models into 3-D objects mid-1800s metal smiths dropped molten beads of metal using computer-controlled production techniques. Our (copper, bronze, silver) and let them solidify to various speculations thus go beyond the confi nes of additive sizes, thus using surface tension as a form-giver. Shot “ink jet” rapid prototyping and include techniques such towers were used to form perfect spheres of lead for shot as contour-crafting, vapour deposition (using moisture- by dropping drops of molten lead a long way into a vat.4 saturated air), and the deposition of super cooled water. Phase change is also important in traditional ways of The project team, based in the School of Architecture building. Liquid mud, for instance, can be moulded into

FIGURE 1 “Old Father St. Lawrence Shaking Off His Coat and Making Ready for a Good Summers Work.”

FIGURE 2 Icicle; Reversed Icicle; Frank Lloyd Wright’s perspective drawing for the Illinois (Mile High Tower).

EXPANDING BODIES: ART, CITIES, ENVIRONMENT 33 DIGITAL METHODS OF FABRICATION AND CONSTRUCTION

adobe bricks. Closer to home, the pure-snow igloo was reinforced by melting the inside surface and refreezing it, thus forming a solid ice shell supporting the snow dome so that it could resist the weight of a polar bear. In using computers to create form with ice, this potential for manipulating phase-change is crucial.

NATURAL ICE In far northern (and southern!) latitudes, widely diver- gent ice formations are a common sight. Nature itself displays water in many diff erent ways, and some of these natural processes may be harnessed to suit modeling or building. For instance, did Frank Lloyd Wright use an icicle as his model for “The Illinois,” his mile-high tower project for Chicago? If not, maybe he should have (Figure 2)! can be structural forms, too. How big can icicles become? Niagara Falls photos show icicles of twenty feet long and more, their ultimate size depending on wind and humidity.5 Experience in the arctic shows solidifi cation of water vapour in very delicate forms such as the -like icicles that form on the metal of Quonset huts in the artic.6 Can this process be duplicated in a computer-controlled production process? It has been common in Northern climates to harvest river and pond ice throughout the winter months and store it in insulated icehouses, to be used for the cool- ing and preservation of food throughout the summer. The McCord Museum has a fascinating collection of photographs dealing with ice harvesting.7 Harvested ice blocks were also used in the construction of dramatic ice palaces, which were erected in cities such as Montreal, Quebec City and Minneapolis-St. Paul as centre pieces of winter festivals, as long ago as 1884 (Anderes and Agranoff 1983; Latouche 2005).8 A very detailed study and pilot project “ICEBOX-Fab- rikaglace,” which proposed using the cooling energy of winter-accumulated ice for summer cooling purposes Top to bottom: was done by the Canadian Federal Government’s Depart- FIGURE 3 Water sprayed on stretched nylon ment of Public Works in Ottawa and Quebec City between double-curved subsurface; McGill University 1976 and 1984. The study is very complete, and it con- 1975 (30 feet high structure, 1" thick ice shell). tains a treasure trove of data on rates of ice accumula- FIGURE 4 Catenary Ice Arch McGill University. 2000 blocks cast in 2 liter milk cartons tion, nozzle design, and general ice-thermodynamics supported by temporary wooden form work that will be of great use to our project.9 More recently, (thickness 4", span 20'). Harvard-MIT research scientist Moshe Alamaro has FIGURE 5 Snow cast in curved plywood forms proposed bulk freezing as a way to store water in the for Ice Pantheon, McGill University, 1996. winter.10 In summer the melt water could irrigate dry Northern areas of the USA. These days the melt energy of ice is used for commercial cooling large buildings, the way small-scale ice blocks were used for domestic cooling for centuries. Similar bulk depositions are already in use for rec- reational ice architecture such as .11 Such bulk or mass deposition is a potential method for a

34 ACADIA 2007 THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF PHASE CHANGE Pieter Sijpkes, David Theodore

CNC carving process; robots could sculpt the mass into layer-by-layer in a freezing chamber (Liu et al. 2002; Bry- inhabitable forms. In later phases of the study, we will ant et al. 2003). These researchers vaunt the low-cost of use the Multimodular Manipulator System (M3) robot ice prototypes, as well as the environmental benefi ts of (designed by a team led by R. Patel and J. Angeles), to using water in comparison to other deposition materials. service and maintain aircraft and space structures, But for us, translating the techniques into architectural composed of three modules, altogether forming a sys- scale production remains the fi nal goal. tem with 11 controlled axes with a vertical reach of 3.5m The project has three main technical hurdles: form- and horizontal 2.5m. The idea is to use bulk deposition, giving, water delivery systems, and adaptation of current and then either a) use the robot to mill the ice based on modeling and CNC software to the unique challenges CAD models or b) cut the mass into ice blocks and use of making ice architecture: How can we use the phase- the M3 to stack them, working much like a traditional change from water to ice or from vapour to ice creatively? bricklayer or stone mason. How do we deposit the water or the vapour; how do we control the quantities, the opacity, the colour, and texture THE USE OF COMPUTERS IN MODELING AND of ice be manipulated? What structural techniques give FABRICATION OF ICE architects and designers the widest range of expres- Using robotics to create forms in ice is not new. As stated, sion when building in ice? What techniques, forms, and ultimately we plan to use robots to allow computers events/situations from current and past architectural to control fabrication, but our fi rst experiments will practice are relevant to computer-controlled ice building? use more established means of translating 3-D mod- Where and when is design in ice appropriate? els to dedicated fabrication devices (e.g. CNC milling Form-giving refers to geometries and shapes ice can machines) where a model is built within preset dimen- take. At once fl uid modeling material and substance with sions. However, as we determine which processes work its own specifi c properties, ice is an ideal winter build- best, we hope to scale up from small objects to architec- ing material. On the modeling side, we will speculate on tural projects, at which point the robot itself will have to how to use parametric software for form-fi nding, and in move. It is this ambition that distinguishes our project turn, how to translate parametric models into task plan- from other engineers interested in ice rapid prototyp- ning for the robots that will build the ice structures. We ing. Researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla, will try to give it form using drip and spray techniques, for example, have developed so-called Rapid Freeze sponge techniques, the “ice-iron,” upside-down accretion, Prototyping, a technique that sprays droplets of water and slanted deposition. The challenges of form giving

FIGURE 6 Ice Pantheon, McGill University Campus, 1996.

EXPANDING BODIES: ART, CITIES, ENVIRONMENT 35 DIGITAL METHODS OF FABRICATION AND CONSTRUCTION

lead directly to the issue of material delivery systems, freezing the water (in 1971 plastic buckets and garden including the need to engineer appropriate valve and hoses were used). nozzle assemblies. Attention will be paid to the possible We also plan to update the ice-palace technique of additives to water which will productively change the building from “bricks.” In 1983, a catenary arch, twenty behaviour of the phase-change process. With ice deposi- feet high by twenty feet span made of 2000 ice blocks tion, even the delivery of the source material (water) to cast in 2-litre milk cartons proved to be quite a stable the production site becomes tricky: additional cooling and elegant structure (Figure 4). As described earlier, we systems for the water are necessary, and most robots do hope to use the M3 robot as the bricklayer in our twenty- not perform well at sub-zero temperatures. fi rst century versions. Can the M3 precisely mill the ice blocks (rather than use standardized “bricks”) and then ICE STRUCTURES AT MCGILL SINCE 1971 stack them in precise patterns (Hönig 2007)? At McGill University, students and teachers in the School The School’s most celebrated ice structure was a one- of Architecture have experimented with many diff erent fi fth-scale copy of the 142-foot dome of the Pantheon in methods of building structures out of ice since the winter Rome erected on the main university campus in winter of 1971 (Sijpkes 1986). An early experiment used a spray- 1996 (Figure 5). The structure was cast in snow using the on technique that resulted in strong, double-curved, ancient pisé technique: 4-foot high bent-plywood forms nylon-reinforced surfaces as large as thirty feet wide 4 feet wide were packed with snow, and the walls went by thirty feet high. This team made these hyperbolic up in four foot rings. The 32 foot wide dome was formed paraboloid surfaces by covering steel scaff olding pipe with the wall scaff olding, which was easy because the with stretched nylon sheets and then spraying the forms diameter of the Pantheon is the same as the inscribed with 1 inch of water (Figure 3). In our updated version, sphere half of which makes up its roof. About 135 mem- we will experiment with parametric modeling to develop bers of the School of Architecture community braved non-regular surfaces, build the surfaces in nylon using the -20C weather to be inside the structure for a group the laser cutter, and then test ways of depositing and photograph celebrating the School’s Centennial (Figure 6; Ouimet 1996; Smith 1996). At the moment, this pisé technique has the most promise for large-scale inhabitable structures. In our digital version, we hope to use the analogy of two-mate- rial prototyping, but with water as both materials. That is, we will create an additive technique where a thin shell of ice acts as a form/support that is then fi lled or covered by the primary fi ll. Researchers at the Univer- sity of Southern California have been experimenting with what they call contour crafting, a procedure that uses a gantry-mounted robot to build thin walls out of (Figure 7), and then fi lls in the “form” using computer-controlled nozzles extruding cement or adobe (Khoshnevis and Bekey 2003). For large scale projects, the in-fi ll material might be delivered by computer- controlled aircraft de-icing systems, a gantry, or man- lift/cable placers. In our case, the nozzles would simply dispense ice or snow or . Indeed, the technique of additive rapid prototyping will require a considerable investment into nozzle design. Fortunately, a fair amount of research has already been done in this area, and we can simply adopt some of it to our own purposes. First, there is FIGURE 7 The University of Southern California’s the possibility of abandoning continuous deposition proposed gantry set up for contour crafting a for drop deposition, a method already used in metals full-sized house. prototyping. Likewise, there is solid engineering sci- FIGURE 8 Project Habbakuk, 1942, a battleship made from water and sawdust. ence on ways to use water surface tension to create ice overhangs (Bryant et al. 2003), and the use of colour and other additives.12

36 ACADIA 2007 THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF PHASE CHANGE Pieter Sijpkes, David Theodore

FIGURE 9 Snow cast on forms: the Quebec 2007; student project, Rami Abou Khalil & Lia Ruccolo.

One interesting venue for additives is the creation open a whole new range of possibilities. In addition to of ice composites: additives added to water to change the Habbakuk project we may also take cues from the the properties of the resulting ice. A very interesting ice cream industry, which can deliver an ice cream mix project using sawdust as an aggregate in ice is the almost at almost any consistency (liquid, gel or solid) at any mythical Project Habbakuk (or Habakuk), executed in temperature allowing diff erent forms of extrusion and great secrecy during WWII. In this project experiments form giving. were done in Lake Louise and Patricia Lake in Alberta by the Allies to study the feasibility of building a very CONCLUSION large battle ship out of a mix of frozen water and saw- In this paper we have touched on various ways in which dust to replace scarce steel. The sawdust reinforced ice, ice can be formed into shapes. By combining natural called after one of the movers and shakers of processes with digitally mediated ones we hope to be the project Geoff ry Pyke, turned out to be very strong able to use ice as a medium for constructions at varying and very resistant to the impact of shells. The war ended scales. These constructions may be small-scale moulds, when only a small prototype had been constructed, but used to cast other materials, or may be complete end-use project Habbakuk gives an interesting glimpse at a very structures. New fi elds for architectural creativity will early industrial approach to the use of reinforced ice thus open up. In recent years, ice-climbing structures (Figure 8).13 Not only in ice, but also in the whole material created by mass-deposition on tower-like supports, some science fi eld, additives (and thus composite materials) as high as 100 feet, have enlarged possibilities for winter

EXPANDING BODIES: ART, CITIES, ENVIRONMENT 37 DIGITAL METHODS OF FABRICATION AND CONSTRUCTION

FIGURE 10 Snow cast on forms: the Quebec Ice Hotel, lounge, 2007. in Northern climates. A new industry of constructing ice has sprung up in and Canada, creating new opportuni- ties for the development of winter tourism and making demands on architects to come up with an appropriate vocabulary of ice architecture forms. So far the hotel builders have used the technique of casting (man-made) snow on re-usable steel forms, usually combined with walls constructed out of blocks. McGill students participate each year in design competitions for the Ice Hotel in Quebec with very encouraging results (Figure 9-10). Hopefully, in the next few years, they will conceive their entries by computer and build them by robot. Many problems related to the peculiar nature of the water-ice phase change will have to be solved before we can reliably produce the forms we outline in this paper. But the authors are confi dent that the use of ice as a modeling and structural material is an avenue well worth exploring, in particular in Canada. Didn’t Quebec singer-songwriter Gilles Vigneault say it best when he proclaimed: “Mon pays, ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver”?

38 ACADIA 2007 THE NEW ARCHITECTURE OF PHASE CHANGE Pieter Sijpkes, David Theodore

ENDNOTES REFERENCES 1. The project, “The New Architecture of Phase Anderes, Fred, and Ann Agranoff . 1983. Ice palaces. Change: Computer Assisted Ice Construction,” led New York: Abbeville Press. by Pieter Sijpkes (Architecture) and Jorge Angeles (NSERC Chair in Design Engineering) is funded Bryant, F. D., G. Sui, and M. C. Leu. 2003. A Study on by a SSHRC Research Creation Grant. The project eff ects of process parameters in rapid freeze pro- team is based at the School of Architecture, and totyping. Rapid Prototyping Journal 9(1): 19–23. includes collaborators Thomas Balaban, David Theodore, and students from robotics Ken Ho- Hönig, Roderick. 2007. Steinerne Leichtigkeit. Hoch- Kong-Ciat, Eric Barnett) and architecture (Cath- parterre 1(2): 10–15. erine Theriault, Jeff rey Yip). Khoshnevis, B., and G. Bekey. 2003. Automated Const-ruc- 2. http://images.businessweek.com/ss/06/08/guer- tion using Contour Crafting- Applications on Earth rilla_ads/source/4.htm and Beyond. Journal of Rapid Prototyping 9(2):1–8.

3. See www.ennex.com/~fabbers/intro.asp#inf Latouche, Pierre-Édouard. “Ice for Tourists.” In Sense of the City: An Alternative Approach to Urbanism, 4. See http://www.virginiawind.com/virginia_travel/ ed. Mirko Zardini, 116–7. Montreal: CCA; Baden: shot_tower.asp Lars Müller.

5. See http://www.nfpl.library.on.ca/stuntupload/win- Liu, Q., G. Sui, M. C. Leu. 2002. Experimental Study On ter_and_ice.htm The Ice Pattern Fabrication For The Invest-ment Casting By Rapid Freeze Prototyping (RFP). 6. See http://www.gdargaud.net/Antarctica/Glacio.html Computers in Industry—an international app-lica- tion oriented research journal 48(3): 181–197. 7. For example see http://www.mccord-museum.qc.ca/ en/collection/artifacts/M967.138.23A§ion=196 Ouimet, B. 1996. Italian Ice: McGill carvers reproduce Rome’s famed Pantheon. The [Montreal] Gazette 8. For an example of an , see http://www. (27 January). mccord-museum.qc.ca/en/collection/artifacts/ VIEW-1599.1§ion=196) Savage, Alfred. 1849. Practical hints on the construc- tion of ice houses: with remarks on the compara- 9. ftp://ftp.tech-env.com/pub/ENERGY/ATESSTES/ tive value of ice formed in diff erent climates. Mon- ICE_STORAGE/ASHRAE_Innovative.pdf treal: J. Starke.

10. http://alamaro.home.comcast.net/WinterIce.html Sijpkes, P. 1986. Teaching the properties of thin shell structures to undergraduate architecture stu- 11. http://www.alaskanalpineclub.org/IceWall/Oth- dents- an empirical method using ice as a model- erIceWalls.html ling material. First International Conference on Light Weight Structures in Architecture, Sydney, 12. For more on additives, see http://www.trnmag. Australia, 24–29 August 1986, Proceedings. Ken- com/Stories/092700/Ice_Rapid_Prototyping_ sington, N.S.W.: Unisearch Ltd., University of New 092700.html South Wales.

13. For a modern demonstration of Pykrete see Sijpkes, P. 1996. A Century of Ice: the architecture of http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzhFnNY0OQI phase change, or, 10 lessons learned leading up to the construction of the Centennial Ice Pantheon. In The Fifth Column 9(2): 4–10.

Smith, E. 1996. Massive snow palace nears comple- tion. In McGill Reporter 28.8.

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