Introduction

Abstract

Architects have been fascinated by robots for many decades, from “Chantier de Construction Électrique”, Villemard’s utopian vision of an architect building a house with robotic labor in 1910, to the design of buildings that are robots themselves, such as Archigram’s Walking City. In the 1980s and 1990s it briefly seemed as if robots had finally arrived in architecture, when the Japanese construction industry started using highly customized robots for high-rise construction. However, amid the turmoil of Japan’s financial problems in the 1990s these experiments were discontinued. Many later robotic projects were performed in a purely virtual environment, as architects were unable to transform their theories into a physical output.