Innovative construction systems within building processes. An approach to large-scale robotic Additive Layer Manufacturing for the conservation of Cultural Heritage.

The inevitability of the Fourth Industrial Revolution highlights the current lack of innovation within the building process, where the construction site continues to refer to methods strongly rooted in building traditions and narrow technological choices. While the construction industry must manage risks based on economics, labor, and safety, new technologies highlight the need to identify new methodologies to enhance construction roles. Interventions carried out according to a digital data-driven strategy can respond to the growing demand for higher quality with prediclatble times in a complex environment and the need to satisfy the requirements of environmental, social, and economic sustainability. In the current age of automation, it is possible to imagine connecting design and manufacturing in a single workflow with the aim of bringing smart tools from industrial manufacturing such as robots to the building site for the conservation of Cultural Heritage. The protection of the site and existing building elements would entail customizing the on-site operations in a responsive way with respect to the characteristics of boundary conditions and compartmentalization of automated equipment. The creation of a workflow is therefore intended not as a standardization of the design outcomes, but as an updating of the technical phases, combining the technological with the cultural instances. Given the trajectory of digital transformation as an emerging ecosystem, a new conception of the master-builder might represent a balanced point between the advancing technological level in architectural construction methods and the artisanal approach that characterizes interventions on Cultural Heritage. The new master-builder constitutes a synthetic figure between the various actors operating in the complex building process. The new master-builder can also be the promoter of the project culture and the supervisor of all the design - construction - management activities that take place in the digital continuum. Decades of positive industry outcomes and recent research advancements in CAD/CAM, with focus on additive manufacturing, allow for the evaluation of successful experiments on the production of customized technological units and informed digital architectures.