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Individual atoms in a 90 nanometer scoop of Nitinol.
Image: jurvetson | Flickr
Why does inspiration strike when thinking about building design in terms of a convergent assembly of elements? Well, here is an explanation about just what a “convergent assembly” means for manufacturing at the molecular level.
Todays manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. [...] One robotic arm assembling molecular parts is going to take a long time to assemble anything large — so we need lots of robotic arms: this is what we mean by massive parallelism. While earlier proposals achieved massive parallelism through self replication, today’s “best guess” is that future molecular manufacturing systems will use some form of convergent assembly. In this process vast numbers of small parts are assembled by vast numbers of small robotic arms into larger parts, those larger parts are assembled by larger robotic arms into still larger parts, and so forth. If the size of the parts doubles at each iteration, we can go from one nanometer parts (a few atoms in size) to one meter parts (almost as big as a person) in only 30 steps.
The Future of Scalability in Architecture
As if to build upward from some sort of DNA structure, building an assembly of parts at smaller scales then fitting that assembly within a larger assembly give should give you “food for thought”.
What if, as an architect, you could design a sort of “DNA seed” from which your buildings would grow, not only as they are built, but also as they age over time? Could your initial design “seed” create a better Read more
