From December 2011 to February 2012, visitors to the FRAC Centre in Orleans can expect to see a very special kind of construction site. During this time, a fleet of mini helicopters known as “quadrocopters” will be circling the exhibition hall of the French architecture centre and constructing a futuristic structure in real time. By the end of the exhibition, 1500 individual blocks will be stacked on top of each other to form a 6m-high model tower block.

The installation is a joint project of the ETH Zurich: Gramazio & Kohler (Architecture and Digital Fabrication) and Dr. Raffaello D’Andrea (Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control) collaborated to design a utopian, futuristic vision of construction linking architecture, production, process technology and engineering.