From pop-up idea to walk-through pavilion: Robot Made 2025 explores rapid-deployable timber structures with Digital Fabrication.
A new sculptural item greeted students arriving to campus this fall – a wooden dome. The unique structure, erected in front of Galbraith Building on the St. George Campus, is the fruition of collaborative efforts between faculties and students. The U of T researchers and students assembled, on site, the prototype full-scale “reciprocal frame” pavilion which was designed on computers, fabricated by robots and assembled by hand.
Robot Made 2025 was led by Nicholas Hoban from Daniels Architecture and Professor Aryan Rezaei Rad (who prefers Professor Rad) from the Department of Civil & Mineral Engineering. The project continues a growing tradition at U of T that blends computation, structural thinking, and “making” following last year’s Robot Made 2024 pavilion and the ROB|ARCH 2024 workshops hosted in Toronto.
The 19 researchers and students from Engineering and Daniels Architecture teamed up this summer to design, robotically fabricate and assemble a full-scale timber pavilion based on reciprocal systems – an interlocking structural strategy where each member supports, and is supported by, its neighbours. The result is a striking walk-through installation demonstrating how digitally fabricated wood components can be rapidly deployed for spatial structures such as pop-up classrooms, festival canopies, or emergency shelters. Over an intensive two-week run, engineering and architectural teams designed, fabricated, and erected full-scale prototypes demonstrating how kit-of-parts thinking and robotic fabrication can turn concept sketches into robust, reusable structures.
Teams worked from parametric definitions to generate reciprocal patterns, optimize member counts and connection geometry, and export shop-ready toolpaths. In the lab, students used CNC milling and an industrial 7-axis KUKA robot to produce precision cuts designed for measurement-free assembly before a fast, scaffold-free, on-site structure. On the Galbraith Building forecourt area, the team erected the modules – comprised of 110 bespoke elements – using simple hand tools, validating that the parts “found” their positions as intended.
Having hands-on experience with using a robot to produce the pieces required for the project was integral to the learning outcome and envisioning future large-scale projects. “I was particularly interested in the robotic fabrication of each component of our structure,” says CivMin MEng student Myriam Bobe. “It’s a new and developing approach to construction. I know it’s been applied in different areas of the industry, but to see it used for manufacturing members, pre-drilling holes, cutting, especially for complex reciprocal structures, was really fascinating.” Elaborating further about the technical aspects, she added, “There’s a lot of background code in Grasshopper and Rhino that we don’t usually see, and watching how that translates from concept to fabrication and then to the construction of an actual structure was very interesting.”
Students learned by doing. “One of the main things that interested me the most was the hands-on experience and being able to build at a one-to-one scale,” says CivMin MEng student Sydney Nguyen. “From my undergrad, it was very hard to get that kind of opportunity and I feel like it’s such a valuable thing to learn. Throughout the project you realize how important each step is in the process. In a design-build project like this, you see how construction matters more than we expect and how the initial preliminary design is just as important. Everything is very intertwined.”
“Reciprocal frames are perfect for rapid deployment: they go up quickly, need no temporary support, distribute forces effectively, and can be disassembled and redeployed with almost no waste,” says CivMin Prof. Rad, who co-led the workshop. “Pair that with CNC and robotic workflows, and the researchers and students experience the full loop from parametric design to on-site assembly.”
The structure is scheduled to be on display in front of Galbraith Building until November 2025.
WATCH THE ROBOT MADE VIDEO:
LEADS: Nicholas Hoban, Aryan Rezaei Rad
STUDENT PARTICIPANTS: Kenny Vo, Nathania Nagarajah, Tony Yang, Shannon Dacanay, Melina Elefteriadis, Elina Parkhomenko, Myriam Bobe, Micha Fairfax-Angod, Tilija Leskauskaite, Yagmur Ceylan, Habib Yosufi, Sydney Nguyen, Keira Fraser, Jack Simon, Ryan Yee.