Visions of Process—Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics in Architectural Design and Construction

This chapter discusses and reviews the application of swarm intelligence (SI) and swarm robotics (SR) to architecture and construction from a history of science and technology perspective. In a first step, it explores the conceptual entanglements of swarm intelligence and adaptive environments and situates them in the context of a recent theoretical discourse about “media ecologies”. The second part provides a critical overview of seminal SI approaches for architectural design. These scrutinize novel connections between architecture as a site of material composition and as a site of spatial practices by computer experiments in software environments. Its guiding hypothesis is that SI technologies here are primarily used to create diversity. Subsequently, the third part of the chapter examines in which ways recent advances in collective robotics lead to further materializations of the adaptive capabilities of swarming that go beyond software applications. It presents three state-of-the-art examples of SR for architectural construction and demonstrates that SR in architectural construction—in contrast to the paradigm of diversity discussed in the context of architectural design—work best in context with a high degree of standardization and pre-defined modularization, or, on the basis of regularity.