Architect proposes rebuilding Mosul with spider-bots and drones

Some 53,000 homes are needed to rehouse the displaced population, and officials say a larger scale rebuilding will require about 10 years and cost $50bn.

The UN has said that £1bn is needed just to replace basic infrastructure, including the city’s five bridges across the Tigris river, all of which were destroyed in the fighting.

Damage to Mosul neighborhoods after the conflict (UNDP Iraq)

Vincent Callebaut’s plan, which won the Rifat Chadirji Prize, centres on rebuilding these bridges, and then homes, with an unusual, printed building block, produced by printing robots and inspired by traditional Islamic architecture.

Each bridge, he said, “will resemble an artificial mountain generated by the repetition of one single basic module of a 3.6m cube”.

The design is inspired by “muqarnas”, the honeycomb pattern used in classical Islamic architecture. Each house would be built up from two, five or 10 of these modules.

The architect suggests that these could be built using five 3D printers in the form of articulated spiders. This, it says, would allow the construction of 30 houses a day, or nearly 55,000 units in five years. The print-bots would be supplied with raw material by drone, and the raw material itself would be recycled from the debris of the battle.

Read the rest of the article at GCR.