3D printing a building with 756 windows

Summary

I’m writing this in a building with 756 windows. I know because I counted, and spent months researching, measuring, designing, 3D printing, and assembling them for the final project of an architecture course I took last spring. I’m a computer science major, but I make a point of taking a few non-math non-CS courses each year, made possible by Brown University’s Open Curriculumn. Last semester, those courses were in architecture and epigraphy; this blog post is about a project for the former. The end-of-semester exhibition. I’m referring to the CBR Building in Brussels. The best-known work of Belgian architect Constantin Brodzki (1924–2021), it was commissioned by Cimenteries Belges Réunie, a Belgian cement company, to serve as both their corporate headquarters and a demonstration of the versatility of concrete. Brodzki was given full access to their factory and worked for nearly a decade to develop the concrete molding process.1 This then-novel construction technique allowed the building to go up at a record speed of one floor per week; a billboard on-site proudly recorded the time each floor took. Furthermore, the glass was embedded into the cement modules in the factory, protecting the floors from the elements and allowing work to progress on the interior as floors above were still under construction. The orange glass, one of the building’s most distinctive features,2 is custom “stopray” glass produced by Glaverbel,3 whose circular offices were just across the chaussée from the CBR Building. The reflective glass helped regulate the temperature of the building, which was the first air-conditioned (office?) building in Belgium. Brodzki, and his friends—famous mid-century furniture designers Jules Wabbes and Florence Knoll—designed custom furniture and interiors, which were preserved when the building was converted into a coworking space in 2018.4 *** Brodzki drew inspiration, not from modernism, but from Art Nouveau, especially admiring the work of fellow Belgian Vi...