Imagining Construction Otherwise

“Imagining Construction Otherwise” presents a speculative yet technically grounded proposition for how construction might be redesigned when robots become integral to the building process. Rather than asking robots to imitate tasks and tools originally designed for human workers, the project poses a fundamental question: what if the structure, its joints, the robotic tools, and the assembly process were designed together as a unified system?

At the centre of the installation is a scaffold-like structure assembled from aluminium tubes. A robotic arm continuously installs and removes selected elements using a patent-pending tapered-screw connector developed through ongoing research at the City University of Hong Kong. Designed specifically for robotic assembly, the connector aligns and tightens in a single motion, allowing mechanical design to compensate for positional inaccuracies.

The installation extends this research into an imagined construction environment. Camera-equipped vehicles navigate the structure while visitors operate them from nearby control stations, experiencing the scaffold from within and through the perspective of a machine at work. Rather than predicting a single future, Imagining Construction Otherwise offers one distinct possibility: that automation requires not simply smarter robots, but a fundamental reconsideration of the objects, tools, and processes through which we build.