Robots That Build (but Still Won't Do Windows)

IN a laboratory in Los Angeles early this year, a robot armed with a concrete pump built its first wall. Just a small wall, about a yard wide, a foot high and an inch thick, but beautifully formed in a graceful oval sweep.

The robot would give a professional builder a run for his money - which is precisely the idea. Its inventor, Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis, an engineering professor at the University of Southern California, envisions houses and apartment buildings being built entirely by machines, saving time and money and reducing human costs like injuries.

The first robot workers sprang into existence in the 1970's. Since then they have been making cars, vacuuming living rooms and exploring Mars. But this is the first one to automate the building process.

It looks nothing like the gleaming humanoids of science fiction. A computer-controlled gantry, the robot builder has a 6-by-6-foot metal frame and a steel cylinder of concrete whose motion is controlled by a laptop computer. It moves back and forth, squeezing out inch-thick layers, building walls from the foundation up.

In theory the robot's descendants will be able to construct not only right angles but also compound curves, as shapely as those in Frank Gehry's Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain.

"Our goal is to completely construct a one-story 2,000-square-foot home on site in one day, without using human hands," said Dr. Khoshnevis, the lead scientist on the project, a joint effort by the university's engineering school and its Information Sciences Institute. With a hoped-for budget of about $5 million, it has been financed so far mainly by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

Although still in an early phase, the technology has caught the eye of the Los Angeles architect Greg Lynn, one of the earliest proponents of computer-driven three-dimensional design, also called blobitecture. Mr. Lynn predicts that such robots could radically alter the way architects work. "Gaudí would have loved these machines," he said, referring to the Art Nouveau surrealist whose curvilinear facades and off-kilter turrets put Barcelona on the architectural map. "Everything Gaudí did you could do with this technology. I'm convinced this will allow you to make beautiful, innovative and as yet unimagined kinds of houses."

Mr. Lynn encountered the robot technology, also known as contour crafting, when it was still in the prototype stage. "If this was up and running, I'd be using it right now," he said last December.

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