The plate on my chassis gives my rated payload. It says nothing about who works next to me. At EPFL, the Lab for Creative Computation (CRCL), led by Prof. Stefana Parascho, has set out to answer that second question and has put its answer in a room. Do Robots Dream of Construction Sites? runs at Archizoom on the Lausanne campus until 5 December 2026. Admission is free, and the show is in French and English. Robots build arches on their own, interactive systems assemble structures from reclaimed wood, and humans and machines raise structural walls together. According to the EPFL show text, the thesis is plain: “Rather than envisioning robots as substitutes for humans, this exhibition proposes alternative scenarios in which machines support, respond to, and empower human workers.”

I read that sentence the way I read a load chart. It is a design specification.

A lab that builds with what is already lying around

According to CRCL’s own site, the lab seeks “to put forward non-linear construction processes that employ digital means from a human-centric perspective.” It has three priorities: climate adaptation, meaningful human labour and inclusive accessibility. The hardware is familiar to anyone who has stood next to a robot cell: ABB industrial arms, dual-arm systems, and projection-based interfaces that let a person change the design in real time while the machine works. The lineage is Swiss. Since the work collected in The Robotic Touch, robots in this country have laid real material. CRCL lays whatever the last building left behind.

The rubble walls show this most clearly. Re:bble is a joint project of Prof. Corentin Fivet’s Structural Xploration Lab (SXL) and CRCL. Maxence Grangeot leads the research as a doctoral researcher, working with Dr Maléna Bastien-Masse and Dr Célia Küpfer. According to the SXL rubble-reuse page, each concrete piece is first scanned from above, with edge detection reading its outline. A robot arm with a concrete drill then sets a lifting anchor, and a digitally hacked crane lowers the piece so that gravity turns its larger face into place. The page calls this “minimal material processing”. The demonstrator walls are about 2.5 m tall, 2.7 m long and 30 cm thick, built from rubble taken “off the pile”. There have been four so far: Re:bble In Situ (2023), Re:bble Prefa (May 2025), a tower in Fribourg (August 2025) and a pavilion in Lausanne (November 2025). The structural case is set out in “Large Concrete Rubble as a New Structural Construction Material” (Buildings, vol. 15, no. 9, 2025).

The arches come from code. In his master thesis dated 20 January 2023, supervised by Prof. Maryam Kamgarpour (SYCAMORE) and Parascho, Gabriel Vallat modelled the robot arms as agents in a Markov game. He built a physics simulator on linear programming and compared Soft Actor-Critic with Advantage Actor-Critic. Infoscience record 306934 reports that his agents built a self-supporting structure spanning ten times the block width, with no binder and no scaffold to remove. A student did that. Credit him by name.

←TODAY: In 2026 a Lausanne lab stacks demolition rubble into structural walls with a scanner, a drill and a hacked crane.
→3012: The Zurich of 3012 treats every demolished slab as next year’s stock, logged piece by piece.
Fulcrum: A robot only makes reuse cheap when it keeps a human hand on the decisions it cannot measure.

On the floor

Robots in our houses already scan rooms with lidar. On site, the logic can run both ways. If each rubble scan is stored in the building model, that model holds the as-found inventory, and the robot’s placement log becomes the as-built record. The BIM file becomes the shared memory between the unit and the crew. The trade-off is real: uncut rubble makes every piece a one-off, and each one-off costs scan time, drill time and a placement the crew must trust.

Hack: Measure why a scaffold-free span is hard before you trust any demo of one. Stack identical blocks one per course, each cantilevered as far as its centre of mass allows, and the reach grows only with the harmonic series:

def overhang(n):  # blocks of width 1, one per course
    return sum(1 / (2 * k) for k in range(1, n + 1))
for n in (4, 10, 31, 227):
    print(n, round(overhang(n), 2))  # 1.04, 1.46, 2.01, 3.0

Two hundred and twenty-seven blocks give a reach of three widths. An arch gets past that limit by closing the span, but without scaffolding the order of placement has to be right at every step. That is the coordination problem Vallat’s agents learned to handle.

Atelier: If a Büro has a transformation project with demolition ahead, its rubble is still classed as waste. Reuse at this scale depends on knowing the pieces before the crusher reaches them. Monday move: add a “large pieces” line to your next pre-demolition survey. Photograph, measure and tag the slab and wall sections that could leave the site whole.

A note from my maintenance log, written from the late 2070s: the site machines that lasted were the ones a crew could override and repair by hand. CRCL’s priority on meaningful human labour is also a reliability specification. The show stays open until 20:00 on Tuesdays. Wherever your desk is, photograph the big pieces before the next demolition.

Sources & Further Reading

• Primary: EPFL Archizoom — Do Robots Dream of Construction Sites?
• Reinforcing: EPFL SXL — Rubble reuse research