PhD opening in 3D printed stone for heritage buildings

The Chair for Digital Building Technologies invites applications for a PhD position on the 3D printing of stone for the restoration of heritage buildings. The doctorate rests on two closely coupled lines of work: the development of a new powder-bed printing system with spatially graded material deposition, and its use to produce replacement parts for historic stone structures. This PhD is part of the collaborative ETH Grant project "Spatially graded 3D printing to elucidate contour scaling of building stones", and will be conducted in close exchange with a second doctoral researcher at the Chair for Physical Chemistry of Building Materials in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering.

Stone is among the oldest building materials, and among the least controllable: its properties are found in the quarry, not designed. Restoration exposes this limitation acutely. A replacement part must be compatible with the original and must enter a dialogue with a structure that has aged for centuries. With historic quarries largely exhausted, selecting and carving natural blocks falls short on every one of these counts.

This project pursues a different premise: that the material properties of stone can become a design medium. The powder-bed printing platform developed at the chair separates aggregates, powder binders, and liquid activators, placing each under independent control during fabrication. The next step, and the technical core of this doctorate, is to vary these constituents within a single piece. A dual powder feed and a dual liquid feed will allow composition, porosity, and appearance to be graded continuously across a printed element, turning a fabrication process into an instrument for specifying material behavior point by point. The machine and the artifacts it produces will be developed together, each iteration informing the next.

The project is conducted jointly with a materials science group investigating deterioration mechanisms of particular concern to sandstones, whose research depends on printed samples with precisely engineered defects and gradients. The capabilities established at the laboratory scale are intended to be transferred to the chair's architectural-scale printer, where graded deposition opens a new design space for façade systems.

Job description

Profile

The Chair for Digital Building Technologies within the Institute of Technology in Architecture conducts research at the intersection of computational design, materials, and construction-scale fabrication. Over more than a decade, the group has developed and operated powder-bed and extrusion-based printing systems at architectural scale, with built results including the tallest 3D-printed structures in the world. In-house expertise in mechanical design, electronics and software, together with complete workshop and prototyping infrastructure, allows research ideas to move directly from concept to machine to printed artifact, and doctoral researchers are given considerable latitude in shaping that trajectory. Our highly diverse and international group offers extensive networks within ETH and internationally. We are committed to diversity by offering flexible working hours, home office options, and other measures to ensure team members can perform their roles effectively.