New process facilitates individualized brick designs
Lucerne/Pfungen - Researchers from the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts and Keller Unternehmungen have jointly developed a new brick manufacturing process. This allows the surfaces of the bricks to be designed individually while at the same time being suitable for series production. The new process is based on findings from a Master’s thesis.
Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts (HSLU) and Keller Unternehmungen, which is headquartered in Pfungen in the canton of Zurich, have developed a process for the individualized design of bricks. According to a press release, this opens up new design options in series production for the visible surface of the bricks for both builders and architects.
The press release explains that the new process takes into account the natural irregularities with regard to texture and color of historic bricks. As a result, the uniqueness of a brick can be used specifically to design a building facade.
“Our aim was to revive and augment these variations, which in modern brick manufacturing have largely become a thing of the past”, comments project manager Cornelia Gassler.
Modular tool attachments for the design of the brick surfaces have been created with the help of an interdisciplinary research team comprising product designers, mechanical engineers and architects. “The technology behind brick manufacturing is thousands of years old”, Gassler explains further, concluding that: “The technically simple attachments that underpin our approach reflect this fact, but at the same time the process can be controlled very precisely thanks to the modern digital technology”.
The focus of modern industrial brickmaking tends to be uniformity. Cornelia Gassler first questioned this approach in her Master’s thesis in 2018, for which she received the Master of Arts Design award from HSLU. On the back of this, the ExxE research project, which is funded by Innosuisse, the Swiss Innovation Agency, was launched in cooperation with Keller Unternehmungen in 2019.
The new designs are now available from Keller Systeme AG under the brand kelesto Signa.
