MUDDY ROBOTS is a new paradigm in building construction, coupling humankind’s oldest building material with advanced additive manufacturing technology to create housing that can save the planet.
We innovated a novel approach to 3D Printed Architecture.
In 2008, Founder Ronald Rael, in his book Earth Architecture, pondered the future of earthen architecture, suggesting it would be made using 3D Printing. Earth is an inherently ecological material. The built environment generates 40% of annual global CO2 emissions. Of those total emissions, building operations are responsible for 27% annually, while building and infrastructure materials and construction (typically referred to as embodied carbon) are responsible for an additional 13% annually. Earth construction produces ZERO carbon dioxide emissions. Earth has excellent thermal mass properties, which can maintain comfortable interior temperatures without the need for mechanical heating and cooling lessening the production of CO2 via the architecture. The utilization of earth requires little embodied energy and structures made of it are highly recyclable. When abandoned, earthen buildings simply melt back into the ground, and their ruins can be used to grow vegetation or be reused again as a building material. The fusion of earth with advanced design and construction is not only a strategy to build sustainably and ecologically — it is also a solution to our global climate challenges.
MUDDY ROBOTS was founded by the 3D printing pioneer in earthen construction, Ronald Rael, the co-founder of the 3D printing make-tank, Emerging Objects and FORUST, the world’s first company to 3D print wood. Muddy Robots was created to reintroduce humankind’s most technologically sophisticated material, the ground beneath our feet, as a building material to solve the global climate crisis, the global housing crisis, and to create beautiful, sustainable, buildings for this generation and several generations beyond our time. He is the Eva Li Memorial Chair in Architecture, the Chair of the Department of Art Practice at the University of California Berkeley, and author of Earth Architecture, a modern history of the oldest building material on the planet, and 3D Printing Architecture , a monograph of his 3D Printing Make-Tank, Emerging Objects.