Autumn Show 2026
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TetrAgora asks how robotic assembly and algorithmic design can make housing affordable, and keep it useful as the lives inside it change. It proposes that homes be built differently: not delivered whole and fixed, but grown from a kit of interlocking parts that can be added to, taken apart and reconfigured as a household grows or shrinks, on the small and awkward sites conventional construction leaves behind.
Four strands of research come together. Generative design and AI agents read an irregular site, ask what its occupants need, and produce layouts they can edit live. A library of reconfigurable geometries turns those layouts into physical pieces, tested for packing and structural stability. The pieces are cast in a concrete where discarded oyster shell, waste from the seafood industry, stands in for cement. Quadruped robots, developed in simulation and validated on the physical machine, assemble them from simple local rules rather than a fixed plan.
Land costs have surged in urban environments globally. TetrAgora wonders whether robotic assembly and algorithmic design can produce housing that adapts to changing needs, and make ownership affordable again.
TetrAgora users pick a site and input needs into a spatial planning algorithm that configures modular parts. Quadruped robots build it, learning reversible assembly. As needs change, only affected parts are reconfigured, so the architecture adapts.
A chain of agents turns language into layout: needs become measurable constraints, constraints become volumes, volumes become packed tiles. Room distances are checked against 160,000 real floor areas, keeping the plans grounded in reality.
Site packing grows rooms across a plot, factoring in setbacks and envelope bounds. Adjacencies govern touching walls as rooms fill the site. Testing multiple random seeds, the packer scores each run for brief match, compactness, and left over space.
Computational 3D layout generations from adjacency graphs: translating initial network layouts into optimised spatial plans, then resolving them into volumetric multi-room and household architectural clusters across varied typologies.
Geometries were packed into a test shell to be scored on fill, overflow and piece count. Combinations were then tested for structural stability. From the resulting pieces we developed connectivity maps that informed the final design.
A recursive loop tested 9 geometries across 24 rotations, giving 303 configurations; higher levels plateaued at 24, so small scale predicts large. Each is scored on packing density and disassembly cost; connector-free faces become architecture.
Each part's form is derived, not drawn: from the system grid, it passes through aggregation, merging, surface negotiation and refinement. Every curve traces to a rule; the bone-like character is the residue of maximising contact between neighbours.
Our material research centres on waste: local, unpriced and low-carbon, if inconsistent. We tested two families, food-waste shell aggregates and fibre-reinforced earth, seeking not the strongest material but the one we could reliably find again.
The latest prototype. Four degrees of freedom per leg: the hip yaws, the knee, ankle and toe pitch. A release-and-attach mechanism at the foot means the same limb that carries the robot also carries the piece.
Inside the apartment, two robots move through the inhabited structure. They share no plan with each other, yet they keep adjusting and reinforcing the design. Each robot reads only the space immediately around it to inform its decisions.
At model scale, magnets stand in for the connection. Polarity does the work: aligned, the foot holds; opposed, it lets go. A placeholder joint, built to test one behaviour, attaching and releasing with no latch.
Two behaviours, side by side. One robot picks up a geometry and calculates every position it could go; the other makes its way to a fixed target, choosing each step from what is around it. Both decide from local information alone.
Onboard, a camera does the sensing. Patterns, colours and shapes tell the robot what each piece is and where it sits, so the structure itself becomes the reference it navigates by, with no external tracking.
The assembly algorithm takes after Langton's ant: a handful of local rules, applied over and over, with no plan and no centre. From them a swarm of robots raises the structure, piece by piece.
Windows aren't cut from finished walls; they're placed first. Each blue plane is a protected zone: agents build up to it, never through it. Fenestration constrains growth instead of subtracting mass. Panels log fill, 800 builders, wandering at zero.
Between two building in Athens, a plot too narrow to build on conventionally. The four floors are one arrangement of a stock that never leaves the site: the pieces waiting at the kerb belong to the building as much as the walls do.
A swarm assembling a corner building that is never finished, only reconfigured.