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Fab-Union / Archi-Union · PROFESSIONAL · DESIGN · FAB LAB

M+ Exhibition Wall — Chi She & J-Office Replication

Robotic Reconstruction of Two Canonical Brick Works

Context
Fab-Union / Archi-Union — Professional Project
Role
Parametric Modeling, Robot Control & MR-Assisted Masonry
Year
2021
Practice
DESIGN · FAB LAB
Location
Hong Kong
Status
COMPLETED
Robotic arm laying recycled grey bricks on the curved Chi She wall replica

Overview

Commissioned by M+ Museum Hong Kong, the project replicated two celebrated brick works by Prof. Philip Yuan — Chi She and J-Office — as exhibition walls. While paying tribute to the originals, the team re-engineered the craft: new robotic systems and computer-vision techniques were applied to reproduce the brick walls with high precision, carrying the original design language into a new context. Chi She's curved wall was rebuilt with recycled grey-green bricks from the old building; J-Office's silk-texture wall was generated by an algorithm that rotates each cement block according to gradients analysed from a photograph of silk, and laid with mixed-reality (Fologram) assisted construction.

Robot arm building the curved brick wall in the fabrication hall
Mixed-reality assisted masonry alignment viewed through a tablet
Perforated parametric brick wall filtering light
Physical mock-up of the brick aggregation logic

Responsibilities

  • Parametric model build for both wall geometries
  • Robot-arm control and fabrication-file debugging
  • Recycled material selection and collection
  • Mixed-reality (MR) assisted on-site masonry

Methodology

  • Robot-path generation: map arm axes A1–A3 and A4–A6 to two 3D point sets, interpolate as spline curves, then average the fitted curves into a smoothed toolpath
  • Motion planning that treats the rising wall as a changing obstacle, auto-generating brick pick-and-place motions
  • Rapid human–machine collaboration: a simple coordinate-frame tool head for brick positioning under a tight schedule and high brick-size variance
  • Fologram MR overlay of the digital model onto the site for alignment, error detection and adjustment in real time