When you write for a magazine about additive manufacturing (AM), there are certain names you get used to seeing: the Boeings, the GKNs, the GEs of the world. It is not so common, however, to walk into an R&D lab and be met with names typically found on the pages of Vogue: Tiffany, Hermès and Dior. But so is the case with Aectual.
It all started with a canal house. In 2013, three Dutch architects operating under DUS Architects had a dream – to design and 3D print a full-size building alongside one of Amsterdam's iconic canals. One of those architects was Aectual's Creative Director Hedwig Heinsman, who is today showing TCT around the company's lab just 20 minutes south of the canal house's location, and what ultimately became a three-year public experiment into the potential for 3D printing in the built environment.
The same three founders moved Aectual to another location and then another as their ambitions and workload quickly outgrew the studio's initial spot. And much like the canal house – which was essentially a living R&D hub with a huge, fused deposition modelling (FDM) printer at the centre – the latest lab is another proof point, this time demonstrating what a future of global, circular, distributed manufacturing for interior architecture could be.
"At the time we were wondering about the next step, how we could really scale," Heinsman tells TCT. "For us that's always been about distributed manufacturing. We said, 'Maybe we really have to try to put that into practice'. Even if we start by doing it here in Amsterdam, it pushes us to really think as if we're already operating a distributed manufacturing model."
