Prof. Pieter Sijpkes fabricates ice model for winning NASA competition entry
Prof. Pieter Sijpkes and Eric Barnett (McGill PhD in Mechanical Engineering, Laval postdoctoral researcher) produced the ice model that was an essential component of the winning submission to the 3-D Printed Habitat Challenge design competition, sponsored by NASA and America Makes, at the World Maker Faire on September 27, 2015. The first-place award of $25,000 went to Team Space Exploration Architecture (SEArch) and Clouds Architecture Office for their design, Ice House. The design competition challenged participants to develop architectural concepts that take advantage of the unique potential of 3-D printing to imagine how habitats on Mars would appear using this technology and in-situ resources.
In Sijpkes' own words (October 1): "I've worked with ice at the School of Architecture at McGill University for many winters since 1972, constructing large-scale structures, first as a student and later as a faculty member. I have continued to work with ice up to the present, but mostly indoors now, at a small scale, using a robotic arm that operates inside a freezer compartment. This robot and the unique ice rapid prototyping system that are currently used were designed and assembled by a very talented and committed PhD student (now a post-doc) named Eric Barnett who, though he now works at Laval University in Quebec City, continues to work with me on the ice robot.
"About three weeks ago we received an e-mail from a group of architects based in New York asking us if we would be able to do some ice modeling for them to complete a competition entry that they were finalizing in a contest sponsored by NASA and America Makes. The competition was for the design of a habitation on Mars for four astronauts, using mostly local materials. Within very little time, Eric and I managed to produce a cutaway ice scale model of the competitors' habitation design, plus, as the fabrication went on over a few days, a continuous online video stream, several still photos, and an animated fast-forward video of the building process.
"The group we worked with was part of a final group of 30 competitors, selected from the initial 165 entrants. I went to New York last weekend to see the display of the proposals of these 30 final entrants which were on display at a very large Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, New York. I noticed, happily, that the proposal for which we made the model was the only one using ice as the required local resource. That same weekend NASA announced that liquid water exists on the surface of Mars.
"Imagine our delight when we heard that the team we worked with had won first prize in the competition with their Ice House entry!"
For further coverage, please see the article and photos in dezeen magazine and the report in The Wall Street Journal (Japan). The video clip on CNET contains images of the ice model and a time-lapse video of the process.