What is BE-AM?

BE-AM | Built Environment Additive Manufacturing is a network, annual symposium, and annual exhibition that brings together experts in 3D printing and additive manufacturing from industry, academia, design, and architecture.

Since the first BE-AM | Symposium in 2015, additive manufacturing has gone through a tremendous development at a breathtaking speed. A large variety of construction materials have been tested for additive processes in research and practice worldwide. Buildings have been printed in Europe, Asia and the USA. The BE-AM | Symposium invites speakers and participants to speculate and extrapolate how AM will change the construction industry in the coming years and decades. Further, we want to exemplify and discuss strategies of integrating AM and 3D Printing into larger and more complex process chains within architecture and the building sector. BE-AM seeks to cover the full range from 3D scanning existing contexts to novel forms of ideation and design methodologies that fully exploit the newly gained potentials to finally materializing innovative constructions.

BE-AM | Symposium

Led by scientists of the Technical University of Darmstadt, BE-AM | Built Environment Additive Manufacturing connects researchers and users interested in 3D printing in construction. The platform spans architecture, civil engineering and manufacturing automation.

Annual highlights are the BE-AM | Exhibition and the BE-AM | Symposium at Formnext in Frankfurt/Main. This year’s exhibitors and speakers will showcase and discuss work from 6 companies in the industry, 7 universities and 2 research institutions. Highlights include free-form facade with printed steel nodes, large-scale printed ceramics, and printed glass at civil engineering scales. The event is hosted by the Formnext fair in Frankfurt, and organized by Prof. Ulrich Knaack, Prof. Oliver Tessmann, Dr.-Ing. Philipp Rosendahl, Dr. Bastian Wibranek, Dr. Chris Borg Costanzi, Dr. Nadja Gaudillière-Jami, Jonas Muth and Malcolm Unger from the Technical University of Darmstadt. Show more!

Watch the 2021 keynotes on demand

Impressions of 2022

BE-AM | Labs

The BE-AM Labs group focuses on the use of Additive Manufacturing technologies in construction. We are a multi-disciplinary research working at the intersections of computational design, material science and additive manufacturing at the Technical University in Darmstadt. Combining novel design processes, material systems and building scales, BE-AM Labs strives to be at the forefront of Built Environment Additive Manufacturing.

This is possible through the BE-AM Lab’s increasing research cluster size and investment in machinery. Our research interests cover a broad range of interdisciplinary fields ranging from Additive-Manufactured Glass connections to material properties of Wire+Arc Additive Manufacturing.

Collaborators

The BE-AM network comprises partners from academia, small business and major industries. It is headed by researches from the fields of architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and design of the Technical University of Darmstadt.