We are pleased to announce our new Seed Fund project advanced BIM for model-based construction, building and refurbishment. We are looking forward to a successful cooperation with our project partners from the Chair for Computing in Civil Engineering and Geo Information Systems, the Chair of Urban and Transport Planning and the Chair for Reuse in Architecture RWTH Aachen University. Within the project we want to take a look at information flow over the complete lifecycle of a building, in order to obtain first approaches towards bridging the gap between planning and construction.

It was a busy week for us. Professor Sigrid Brell-Cokcan presented our paper Towards New Robotic Design Tools at ACADIA 2016 which was hosted by the University of Michigan Taubman College in Ann Arbor. This paper was written together with Johannes Braumann of Robots in Architecture and covers the use of collaborative robots for the creative industry.

Meanhile Sven Stumm was in Prague where we had been invited to Cafe Neu Romance, the worlds first international robot performance festival. Here he gave a lecture on our work on haptic programming and interactive learning which we use to bring human and robotic work closer together.

At the same time Elisa Lublasser was in Munich at the IAARC Academy on Advanced Construction and Building Technology for Society. Here she presented the research into facade deconstruction that we have been performing together with Prof. Thomas Bock from the Chair of Building Realisation and Robotics at TU Munich.

And lastly Daniel Haarhoff luckily did not have to travel far for the MTM and Robotics 2016 in Aachen. He presented the work we have been performing together with Prof. Dirk Abel of the Institute of Automatic Control in a paper titled Actuator design for stabilising single tendon platforms.

Together with Robots in Architecture we showcased the AROSU project as well as a new robot programming interface in Dynamo at this years AU Germany. Using the mxAutomation interface Dynamo became the robot controller, directly feeding commands to the robot. On the second day Daniel Haarhoff from our chair and Johannes Braumann from Robots in Architecture held a session on the potential for robotic design and construction. It was an interesting two days and great to watch the eyes of people light up when they see what can already be done with robots. Thank you to Autodesk for inviting us and to the event team for their fantastic support.

We made use of the last days of calm before the new semester starts and toured the roof of Aachen Cathedral and got to know our new team members: Viktoria Falk, Seok Chung and Victor Bausinger. It was humbling to learn about the engineering prowess that existed 1200 years ago and how the various epochs of construction now interact. A big thank you to Dombaumeister Helmut Maintz for the fascinating tour.

If you are in Vienna from now until March 2017 make sure to visit the Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW). It is hosting an exhibition titled the end: architecture – journeys through time 1959 - 2019. The exhibition travels through the past sixty years of architecture highlighting how the past is influencing the current and how each ending can also be a beginning.

Our projects DIANA – Dynamic Interactive robotic Assistant for Novel Applications and the recent master thesis kinetic weaving are being show-cased as part of the exhibition.