This article was taken from the September 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
The Silk Pavilion was built by 6,500 Bombyx mori silkworms, laying down 6,500 kilometres of thread -- equal to the length of the actual Silk Road -- across a frame of 26 hexagonal panels. The project group, led by MIT Media Lab's Mediated Matter group, in collaboration with James Weaver of Harvard's Wyss Institute and Fiorenzo Omenetto of Tufts University, tracked the silkworms as they span their threads
in order to study their decision-making. "We started with the goal of designing a fibre-based 3D-printing platform modelled after the silkworm, but ended up using nature herself," says Neri Oxman, assistant professor of media arts and sciences at the lab. "The silkworm embodies everything an additive fabrication system lacks: it jets a structural material with superior function--specific variable properties; it's small and mobile; and it can spin non--homogeneous structures without waste.
A silkworm is a multi-material multi-axis 3D printer."
Oxman thinks that the subtle choices a silkworm makes when light, heat and other elements change, is a kind of "biological computation." If this can be modelled, she says, it would improve what we currently have for optimising free-form printing. We could even see swarms of nanoprinters used in future building projects.
There's also the flexibility of silk as a building material, one that can mend itself or biodegrade by design. "You can build function into architectural objects that scale," says biomedical engineer Omenetto. "Nature does things better than we do. What surrounds you becomes adaptable and interactive; it can be self-healing and reconfigurable. You enter a space where creativity is going to rule. It's going to be a lot of fun."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
