Applied Additively Manufactured Ceramics for the Built Environment

This dissertation focuses on the application of additive manufacturing technologies for ceramic materials and their use in building construction. After putting the topic of ceramics in architecture into its technical and historic context, a variety of preceding projects from this field are presented. From evaluating these preliminary findings, a research-occasion has been derived, featuring a set of hypothesises on how an industrialized production of such components may be realized. By investigating two of these hypotheses in more detail, methodologies to exceed the geometric freedom, as well as to harmonize the printed component’s appearance with commercial ceramic building products have been developed. In order to assess the usability of the developed methodologies in an industrial context, a case study was carried out. A commercially-available product, the nesting bricks, which are yet being produced in a manual process, were used as an object of study. First, their geometries were printed directly, before optimizations have been made in a second iteration. Through this, time-savings, as well as a more favourable appearance were achieved. Ultimately, conclusions drawn from the multiple stages of this research have been summarized and an outlook was presented on how a further utilization of this technology may look like.