Rupert Soar Email & Phone Number

Rupert Soar is internationally recognised for his work in digital fabrication for construction and holds a part time post at Nottingham Trent University to support his research activities. He lectures ‘digital construction methods’ and ‘nature inspired construction’. Rupert works at the interface between field research and engineering application in ‘digital construction technologies’. Rupert consults and works with ‘early adopter’ construction companies, for example, seeking to automate ‘off-site’ techniques to improve capacity, quality, aesthetic and capability and is active within bio-inspired innovation, acting on the advisory panel for Biomimicry UK.Rupert is an expert in how organisms integrate many (often opposing) functions into a single constructed solution, in particular termites and their extraordinary mounds. Integration comes about because there is always a scarcity of resource to its many agents or organisms within a swarm. Unlike human design, in nature ‘materials are expensive and design is cheap’ and fierce competition between agents, drives the efficiencies and complexities we increasingly require, where we are also facing resource scarcity as our population soars. Rupert’s research spans swarm construction robotics (working with Harvard and Cornell University), construction scale 3D printing (he built the UK’s first concrete printing technology at Loughborough University), and agent modelling (he produced the first termite inspired algorithm to understand termite construction), in order to realise the construction methods used in nature for emerging human technologies. Most recently he has been promoting ‘phenotechnologies’ (see youtube video) to describe emerging digital fabrication capabilities where technological solutions sense, interact, modify and persist within the environment they operate within (now part of the 4th industrial revolution underway). Rupert has developed modules in and exhibited ‘agent architecture’ and ‘scripted functionality’ and is defining the field of biomimicry. Rupert contributes to and has held visiting posts with leading architectural schools such as the AA, Waterloo (Canada), Syracuse (USA), Greenwich, IAAC (Barcelona) and Georgia Tech. Rupert is engaged with research projects with the Wyss Institute, Harvard University, the State University of New York and NCBS (Bangalore).