The Brick Labyrinth is a large-scale construction built in the Robotic Fabrication Laboratory (RFL), a unique multi-robotic setup for automated prefabrication at architectural scale. With its dimensions of 8 m by 10 m in plan and a height of 2.8 m, the Brick Labyrinth is the first large-scale construction built in the recently opened Robotic Fabrication Laboratory at ETH Zurich with its four collaborating robotic arms suspended from two gantries and a work area of 45 m by 17 m. 

The project highlights the significance of computational design and robotic control by solely working with a dry-stacked construction method. The unique setup of the project and its material system demonstrate a fully reversible construction process at architectural scale, suggesting a new approach to physical prototyping, which could fundamentally change the way we design buildings.

 

The efficiency of the inherently slow robotic pick-and-place procedure was increased by the development of a new robotic end-effector, a brick magazine that can hold a stack of eight bricks at a time and dispense them one after the other. The simultaneous use of two synchronized robotic arms suspended from one of the two gantries in the RFL further increased the speed of the process. The final structure consisted of 10,135 bricks weighing 30 tons placed over the course of 19 days. Through a custom computational design and robotic control setup students developed all project stages and built multiple full-scale prototypes.