>> There's almost an emotional response to a robot,

you know, there is this kind of idea that a robot is sort of an artificial human.

But of course, all the other things that make architecture what it is are the things that come,

you know, beyond the mechanical, beyond the automated.

And what Gramazio and Kohler are doing in Zurich that's really fascinating to us is

they're breaking away from the idea that a robot is there to do menial, repetitive tasks

and they're intervening in that world.

They've been able to programme what the robot does.

In a way, they're kind of using it as an extension of their own bodies, their own tools,

and changing what it does as it moves along.

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>> Robots have been around for the good part of 90 years.

They really got going in the 1970s, the 1980s, and there are more sophisticated robots than this,

but the fact that they've been brought into an environment where they're being used as design tools is the exciting thing.

>> Now that the tools, both the hardware and software,

are becoming more affordable and easier to use,

architects have actually been able to use the same kind of tools that have been out of reach for so long.

So, yes, it's only the beginning of things,

but we really see some opportunities in design and fabrication.

They won't necessarily build whole buildings,

but this country does have very old building stock;

so we literally need to retrofit thousands of buildings every day to meet up with demand.

And so it's certainly worthwhile considering how these kind of technologies can work alongside traditionally skilled labour

to actually be able to keep this country's buildings up to the standard that they need to be.

>> What we're looking at now with these technologies is,

we can bring them into the academic environment and students and academics can, in effect,

experiment with the idea of building, the idea of making.

I think that opens up a very exciting new domain for universities,

it might be that we are starting to be regarded potentially as a place to prototype things

that might not be prototyped elsewhere.

We can carry a certain level of risk that the commercial world can't carry

in the sense that research that fails is very valuable,

but in the commercial world it's a lot --

it's obviously a very different scenario.

So I think this technology opens up not just something for architects,

but for universities across the whole built environment sector

and allows us to do things that can't be done elsewhere.

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