Digital Fabrication: Shaping the Future of Architecture

By Lefei Chen, Junior Project Manager - Academic Relations

Architecture, as an interdisciplinary field, has always been both challenger and utilizer of cutting-edge technologies of its era. Moving towards the 4th Industrial Revolution, digital fabrication with its new advancements in computational manufacturing opens a new realm for a high-quality, future-oriented, large-scale architecture environment, blurring the lines between digital design and physical construction. In the first edition of our nexFrontier series on April 20th, high-profile speakers from Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication, ETH Zurich, Tongji University and Southeast University introduced us to this sci-fi-like world that makes architectural intelligence the reality.

Celebrating the debut of the new nexFrontier series, Dr. Felix Moesner, Science Consul & CEO of Swissnex in China gave a welcome speech introducing nexFrontier as the newly launched webinar series to spotlight cutting-edge research in Switzerland and China, with a particular focus on NCCRs and top-class research labs in China. We hope that this new series could introduce the most pioneering research advancements to an enthusiastic audience while promoting potential exchanges and collaborations.

Firstly, Prof. Dr. Philippe Block from the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich, Director of the Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Digital Fabrication (DFAB), introduced the NCCR DFAB. Its main research focus is to overcome the challenges to be brought by the huge increase of the world population by 2.1 billion by the year of 2050. Translated into the number of new constructions, this means an equivalent of one New York city every month for the next forty years, which will be accompanied by more emissions, construction wastes and energy consumptions. DFAB believes that architects need to change the way of design and building structures. Started in 2014, DFAB has engaged over 140 dedicated researchers from prestigious Swiss universities. Lots of researches have been scaled up into real construction applications. For example, as an experiment house, the roof of the DFAB is robotically assembled relying on a new digital timber construction method developed by researchers from ETH Zurich.

Architect lab, robotically assembled roof

Prof. Dr. Philippe Block  stressed that DFAB is committed not only to bringing new technologies and methods but also to offering these methods to the world and engage the manufacturing industry. In the third phase of its development, DFAB is planning to tackle four grand challenges: the first is digital timber, which will bring the digitized timber industry into the next level by augmenting true interaction with robot onsite; the second is digital concrete, which is going to explore how reinforcement and concrete go together; the third challenge is digital construction site, where DFAB will look at the balance between full automation onsite, capitalizing on large-scale robotic, and additive manufacturing to cooperate working robots, etc.;  the fourth challenge is digital collaboration, how we can learn from what we do, fully understanding the socio-economical impact of all the technologies that have been introduced.

Prof. Block also introduced one of his projects on rethinking and reducing the most wasteful structure elements - the floor. In medium-high buildings, 75% of its weight is in structure, and more than half of the weight is on the floor. Bringing back historical principles of compression and the advancement of digital fabrication in shaping this non-standard structural geometry, Prof. Block’s team significantly reduced the volume of concrete and steel needed and made the content 100% recyclable and carbon-free.

1.5 tons of ETH researchers sitting on a thin 2cm structure

Then, Prof. Dr. Philip Yuan, Associate Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) at Tongji University, introduced Digital FUTURES, a global platform launched in 2011 by Prof. Dr. Philip Yuan and Prof. Neil Leach, focusing on research and education that addresses digitalization in architecture and design. Every year, DigitalFUTURE organizes conferences, webinars, and workshops according to its annual theme, and invites prominent educators from leading schools of Architecture and architecture associates to create diverse, inter-cultural, and meaningful dialogues. Last year, DigitalFUTURE got the Innovative Academic Program Award of Excellence by ACADIA.

Prominent Educators at Digital FUTURES

Prof. Yuan said that the workshops are mostly cross-disciplinary, covering fashion design material science, computational design, and digital fabrication. Last year, despite the pandemic, digitalFUTURE has received about 12295 applications from all over the world, reaching a new peak since its initiation.

Publications co-authored by Prof. Dr. Philip Yuan

In parallel with DigitalFUTURE events, Prof. Yuan has co-authored and published a series of books where young architects can learn and engage in computational design and robotic fabrication. In the end, Prof. Yuan shared different research projects from his team, progressing from Robotic 3D Printing (2017), Robotic Metal Printing (2018) to Multi-material Robotic Fabrication (2019).

DigitalFUTURES 2019: Multi-Material Robotic Fabricated Bridge

Subsequently, Prof. Dr. Benjamin Dillenburger, Professor at the Institute of Technology in Architecture (ITA) at ETH Zurich, Principal Investigator at NCCR Digital Fabrication, introduced his research on additive construction. He stressed that we need to rethink the use of construction materials, prefabrication, building-elements for future construction. To illustrate this idea, Prof. Dillenburger took the construction of the highly automated elements from the car industry as an example and raised the question of whether we can manufacture buildings like cars. Large-scale additive manufacturing in collaboration with computational design is a promising technology to help achieve that. He showed us his work on both small-scale printers and large-scale (4m-2m-1m) printers that can work constantly for 48 hours and in high resolution that is 100 times more than the print we use currently.

Large-scale (4m-2m-1m) printers

He said that this technology allows architects to make highly bespoke and differentiated elements. Therefore, using manufacturing fabrication in robotic degree means complexity is not a challenge in architecture anymore where fabricating a simple rectangular box is not faster than fabricating a highly complicated and differentiated work as shown below.

Architecture presented in Exhibition in France

He also pointed out the potential of additive manufacturing in dematerialization. Instead of creating 200kg concrete building waste that is carbon-intensive, 3D printing could optimize the process by removing the redundant materials via computer to make the topology. Machine learning in this case was introduced to allow very direct design in the optimization routine.

Last but not least, Prof. Dr. Hao Hua, Associate Professor at Institute of Architectural Algorithms & Applications at Southeast University introduced his research focuses on generative art, which transforms codes into graphics and geometries by using Processing - a programming software nowadays widely used by scientists and artists and believed to have huge potential in generative arts. Processing can simulate dynamical systems which develop abstract line patterns that come from either human imagination or nature, and these beautiful and creative patterns could be applied to the design of clothes, bottles, and fans, etc.

T-shirt using generative art to mimic the image of nature

Prof. Hua underlined that this technology teaches a machine how to recognize a flower, where the designer should fit data with a family of polynomials to make a parametric model and then make the final composition.

Machine learning process to recognize a flower

Besides, he explained that generative arts can also help to collect, analyze and recombine previous cases by recognizing structure information of the architect through programming. After that, the computer could use this structure data to make new designs. Once providing the basic requirements, computers could provide thousands of solutions within a second. However, as Prof. Hua mentioned, in this case, it is interesting to rethink the relationship between designer and machine, because the machine could be very creative.

Multiple design solutions by computer

In the Q&A session, speakers answered questions about the challenges in digital fabrication. Prof. Yuan said we should engage this highly efficient, precise, and sustainable technology into the architecture industry globally as quickly as possible to reduce the heavy carbon emission and waste by the traditional construction method. Prof. Block stressed that in the initial stage of digital fabrication, it is for this newcomer to challenge a traditional construction system that has existed for hundreds of years. People are still doubting many aspects including the cost and safety of the new materials. However, what is more important for us to evaluate is the impact and value-added of this technology on sustainability and our future. Cooperative efforts from the government, builders, and customers are necessary to enable the wide application of this technology. Prof. Dillenburger added that in order to popularize digital fabrication, workers with new design and building knowledge are highly demanded. However, today, there is still a gap of knowledge, education, and labor in this area. This is a challenge, but also a big opportunity for the future of education. Prof. Hua said that students in architecture usually have a stereotype in their designing process where they usually presumed a specific shape in a conventional way instead of a wider range of possibilities and imaginations. Therefore, it is important for students to think about design in a computation way with infinite possibilities.

We would like to thank the 1000+ audience (via Zoom and livestream) who joined our first nexFrontier webinar and participated in the dynamic conversations. We appreciate all the speakers for their insightful and inspiring contributions. Swissnex in China will continue to bring about more exciting events, please stay tuned!

Novel Material Discovery: The Marvel of Computational Science

By Lefei Chen, Junior Project Manager - Academic Relations

Materials are at the core of key solutions to challenges we are facing today, from energies and environment to health and biomedical engineering, etc. When Steve Jobs published the first iPhone using a transparent conductor to remove the keyboard, people knew all smart changes were possible. Thanks to the advancement of computational science, the long and painstaking process of new material discovery has been largely automated with an additional sense of creativity. In order to know more about this promising area, on June 22, 2021, in the second edition of nexFrontier series, we invited experts from NCCR MARVEL (Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials), EPFL, Fudan University and Beihang University to introduce us into this wonderland.

First, Professor Nicola Marzari, director of NCCR MARVEL gave us a funny example of how computational science can help scientists to predict the properties of materials from the First Principle without actually doing the experiments. For example, in Swiss watch industry, the quantum mechanical simulation could help to predict the colors and shapes of metal Aurum into metallics in a fast and authentic way without actually making the object.

Professor Marzari said that as the computational simulation gets increasingly faster with the development of information and communication technologies, a trillion-dollar market is prospected over the next decade. Seizing the trends of future development, Switzerland started the National Centre on Computational Design and Discovery of Novel Materials in 2014, engaging 41 experts from 12 swiss institutions with an idea that a number of principal investigators could work for 12 years around this ground-breaking area. With a generous budget around 50 million CHF, the centre could start ambitious initiatives including harvesting materials for energy collection, storage and conversion, materials for ICT, high tech and pharmaceuticals etc.

Professor Marzari then elaborated on a project in the computational exfoliation of all known inorganic materials. Since low-dimensional materials are very different from 3-dimensional materials regarding their physics and chemistry aspects, the exfoliation of inorganic materials into layered structures would greatly help to define their individual properties. Powered by a big database encompassing known inorganic mechanical materials with one million different structures, scientists could use the computer to figure out whether these materials are geometrically layered rather than 3 dimensional so that characterization using quantum mechanical simulations are possible. At the same time, a powerful calculation system can automatically calculate the various properties of around a million materials in the database without any human intervention.

Secondly, Professor Xingao Gong from Key Laboratory of Computational Physics Science of Fudan University, elaborated on how to understand solar cells, the energy harvesting materials, from the perspective of computational studies. Based on the photoelectric effect, the solar cell has become very popular in striving toward carbon neutrality. In the next 50 years, it is expected that solar cell would provide over 30% of electricity in China.

In order to get the most efficient solar cell in Photoelectric conversion, we need to find materials that have good properties in VBM and CBM to improve the process of light absorption, separation and transport of photogenerated electron-hole pairs, and collection of electric charge. In this aspect, computational science helped to design a system with multi ternary semiconductors for absorber with more elements and flexible properties. Currently, Cu2ZnSnS4 and Cu2ZnGeSe4, were figured out as the two best gap materials.

Another example is the simulation of the solar cell’s interface consisting of CdS, the buffer and CdTe, the absorber to understand the function of this combined structure. However, the lattice mismatch between the two layers is too big for real-life simulation and the supercell has too many atoms for the application of First Principle. Professor Gong and his team solved this problem by using the Neural Network Potential using computational science, and then compared it with the real VASP potential. They are delighted to find that the difference between the two is very small.

Computational science not only can help design a new structure but also can test why a widely applied structure is the better one than many others, for example, by calculating the capture rate of Cu2ZnSnS4:Snzn and CH3NH3PbLPbi, that is, the defect in solar cell, we can know that the former one has a capture rate ten to the third power higher than that of the latter one, which means it can waste a lot of efficiency of the cell. Needless to say, computational science can contribute to the solar cell, absorber materials, interface properties defect and its related properties, which could play an important role in the application of solar energy.

In the area of chemistry, Professor Corminbeuf from EPFL, showed us computational chemistry in the age of big data with a focus on the theoretical framework in the concept of catalysis. It is surprising to know that instead of watch (10%), the largest share of export in Switzerland is chemical and pharmaceutical products, accounting for 44.8% of total Swiss export, and 90% of these chemical compounds are synthesized by the catalyst. Therefore, computational approaches do contribute significantly to this field. According to Sabatier’s principle, the active catalyst will balance the energy requirements for all steps, so it is very useful to build up maps that cover the different properties of catalysts and allow scientists to navigate upon in searching for the best catalyst.

Relying on big data, different capabilities and regions of catalysts can be cast into very simple plugs - volcanic plugs which have only one descriptor that should be computable using the First Principle approach or accelerated using machine learning techniques. Then these different types of catalysts can be categorized into three types: too strong, too weak, and the ones that reach the Sabatier optimum. This smart technology has enabled interactive exploration of catalysts by screening, and 557 catalysts were identified in the small plateau region out of nearly 20000.

In the area of pharmaceuticals, Professor Wang from Beihang University presented to us how computational science could help in searching for the effective design of drug product. Usually, the drug particles we eat are wrapped in a wax capsule which can dissolve in our stomach; however, during the manufacturing process, the machine usually mixes the several substances together into a liquid form without control of the structure of the drugs. Traditional direct modelling usually requires a very sophisticated Multiphysics process and is multiscale in time and space. In this case, computational science can help to simplify the process through a surrogate model created between Local Geometry and the Global Property, the effective diffusion coefficient of the drugs, while using Minkowski functionals to present the geometric description of the porous network.

This model could also provide sensitivity test to the manufacturer to understand which parameters have the most impact on the probability density function and help them to improve their drug design. Professor Wang stressed that thanks to computational science multidisciplinary collaborations between Physics, Mathematics, and pharmaceuticals are largely enabled and facilitate the exploration and discovery of new materials.

In the Q&A session, topics such as real-life simulation, collaboration with experimentalists, and advice for young talents were discussed.

Finally, great appreciation to our speakers Prof. Nicola Marzari, Prof. Xingao Gong, Prof. Clémence Corminboeuf, and Prof. Peng (Koby) Wang, for their availability and great insights. We also would like to thank the audience who joined our second nexFrontier webinar and participated in the dynamic conversations. Looking forward to meeting you at our next events!

Swiss Alumni China - Alumni Extravaganza at the Bund

By Lefei Chen, Junior Project Manager - Academic Relations

With last year’s memories still freshed in mind, on June 4th, 2021, Swissnex in China officially representing all Swiss Public Universities in China, hosted the annual grand SWISS ALUMNI CHINA soirée on the largest Merrystar Cruise Ship along Shanghai’s iconic Bund waterfront. With a network of about 3,000 Alumni from Swiss Public Universities, 375 Alumni from 25 Swiss Public Universities confirmed for this alumni extravaganza, traveling from all over China to Shanghai.

This year’s gathering was graced by the presence of the Swiss Ambassador to China Bernardino Regazzoni and Consuls General in Chengdu and Shanghai.

Welcoming the soirée, Ambassador Regazzoni highlighted that this year’s event was the largest in scale since the first alumni event organized in Beijing in 2008. With two newly created chapters of Bern University of Applied Sciences (BFH) and University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) joining, this year’s gathering also has the record-high number of alumni chapters attending. He was glad to see the awareness as well as the number of attendants growing over the years.

He acknowledged that the Sino-Swiss exchange on research and academic has entered a new level since the Sino-Swiss Science and Technology Cooperation program established in 2003: about 3000 alumni of Swiss public universities in China, over 250 agreements between Chinese and Swiss public universities signed, more than 2000 Chinese students choose to study in Switzerland every year. Despite the current pandemic, Sino-Swiss cooperation on higher education does not stop. Notable new cooperation was created, including the Institute of Risk Analysis, Prediction and Management (Risks-​X), i.e. the first university-level collaborative research institute between ETH Zurich and Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) in Shenzhen, China; the ground-breaking of the Shenzhen International School of Design, i.e. the first Sino-Swiss university in China; the creation of Swiss Innovation Centre by FHNW, BFH and Shenzhen Technology University; as well as other well-known cooperation projects such as the Geneva-Tsinghua-Initiative, which has gone through its third year and already cultivated hundreds of talents to tackle the SDG related problems.

Concluding the speech, Ambassador Regazzoni underlined that the relationship between nations is not just about interactions between governments or leaders; rather, it is more about relationships between people, especially alumni who shared the same experiences studying and living in both Switzerland and China, and act as informal ambassadors upon their return. This event is a wonderful platform to exchange, foster the connection among the growing Swiss alumni communication and he wished the event a great success with an inspiring experience.

Following the Ambassador’s address, the floor was given to 9 active Alumni Chapters in Shanghai to share the latest news and present their activities. This year, Alumni from EHL (Ecole hôtelière de Lausanne) formed the biggest group, counting 58 of the registrants, closely followed by ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen’s 50 alumni. Alumni from other universities also witnessed great increases: 45 from University of Zurich, 37 from EPFL (École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne), 32 from The Graduate Institute Geneva (IHEID), 30 from University of Geneva, 17 from University of Lausanne, 12 from University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW), 9 from University of Bern, 9 from University of Basel.

The rest of the night was a networking reception complemented with a job fair activity, offering a high-in-demand platform for exchanging job perspectives. At the same time, it was a great opportunity for Alumni to stay connected and share ideas while enjoying an evening cruise along Shanghai's iconic Bund waterfront. The event highlights Switzerland’s excellence in education, research, and innovation, with the goal of fostering a strong community in China.

Swissnex in China Team would like to give a special thank to the chapters and our generous sponsors, Merrystar, Shanghai Mingxin Cruise, Lindt, Weleda, swissmooh, Nespresso, Appenzeller Bier, Kambly, bottlesXO! We look forward to seeing everyone again in 2022!

EMBA delegation of University of Zurich visits swissnex China

By Libing Gu, Project Leader Academic Relations

In the afternoon of October 22nd, swissnex China had the great pleasure to receive the visit of 36 EMBA students from University of Zurich (UZH). Dr. Felix Moesner, CEO swissnex China presented the landscape of higher education, research and innovation in China as well as the mission and activities of swissnex China.

Dr. Felix Moesner, Science Consul and CEO of swissnex China, presented the swissnex China mission to the delegation.

Mr. Olivier Zehnder, Consul General of Switzerland in Shanghai introduced to Sino-Swiss relations and Swiss presence in China and Shanghai.

The group was then instructed by Gianna Abegg, Swiss-Attorney-at-Law of eiger about legal issues when doing business in China.

Patrick Glauser, Head of Operations & Business Development of M-Industry China gave a glimpse of doing e-commerce in China and shared some experiences of the company with the group.

Marco Duri Cabalzar, General Manager of Garaventa Lift (Shanghai) then talked about the lessons he learned during his professional experience in Shanghai with useful suggestions about how to develop business in China.

During the Q&A session, all the students were keen to know more about the opportunities and challenges of Chinese market entry and asked numerous questions about business operations under the complicated economic, social, technological and cultural environment of China.

After the rich afternoon program, the delegation attended a networking apèro organized by UZH and swissnex China in Kartel Wine Bar, where they met 20 UZH alumni, including participants of MAS in European and Chinese Business Management program and enjoyed the fresh evening of Shanghai.

Composed of leaders and senior managers in enterprises or government administration, the EMBA delegation of UZH embarked on a field trip to China to get in-depth knowledge about doing business in the most fast-growing economy. swissnex China wishes them a fruitful trip in China and looks forward to welcoming them again in 2019!