

What if your Ikea desk could assemble itself? If Skylar Tibbits has his way, parts will someday put themselves together, better than you ever could.

Sitting on a table in Skylar Tibbits’s lab, at MIT’s new Center for International Design, is a 200-gallon-fish tank—it's large enough to hold one of Damien Hirst’s pickled sharks. If Tibbits’s experiment goes according to plan, within the next few weeks, it will be the scene of a sort of fractal monster movie. A 50-foot-long strand of coded mystery material will be dumped into the water-filled tank, and transform—without benefit of human hands!—into a sweet little 8-inch square Hilbert curve.

How long will it take? Nobody knows.


The concept of self-assembly isn’t new: It has been used at nanoscale for years. But Tibbits is an architect. Sure, folding proteins is cool, he thought, but imagine if you could use this technology to build bridges and buildings—or even just pipes? Now, that would be a totally different dimension of cool. "I thought, 'If you can’t see it, why do it?'" he says. "I wanted to go larger scale."

On the wall is a large aluminum and polyethylene structure called a Voltadom, bent into curves that mimic a vaulted ceiling. Along the edge of each piece is a series of tiny bolts, holding the whole thing together. It’s a tiny section of a larger, 30-foot long, artwork that Tibbits constructed for MIT’s 150th anniversary in 2011. The structure required somewhere north of 5,000 bolts. It took Tibbits and his team of worker bees nearly a month to assemble the object the Olde School way, that is, piece by piece, by hand.


But Tibbits is no ordinary grunt. His bio extends from being one of Zaha Hadid’s hive of young architectural renegades to being the co-teacher of the architectural section of MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld’s popular "How to Make (Almost) Anything" class. So he was in a unique position to figure out how to make something make itself.


Then, a few months ago, Tibbits mentioned his frustration to some of the folks at Stratasys, one of the industry leaders in 3-D printing. Fortuitously, they had just developed a breakthrough new material that transforms in water, they said. Would he like to try it?


Tibbits was psyched. He began tinkering in his shop. Using the new material, he designed and printed a long strand of pieces, using Autodesk’s Cyborg software then dunked it in a tub of hot water. Before long, the strand had wiggled its way into spelling out the initials of his alma mater, "MIT."








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