By Suzanne Ma
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
CHINATOWN — Brick by brick, an industrial-sized robotic arm is building a wall in the middle of Chinatown traffic.
The machine, mounted on a mobile trailer, was shipped from Switzerland to New York City to construct the "Pike Loop" — a 72 foot-long structure made of 7,000 grey bricks.
When the arm is finished building the wall on Oct. 27, the wall will weave along the pedestrian island on Pike St. between East Broadway and Division St.
"The bypassers, they're quite amazed at the machine," said Michael Knauss, the Pike Loop's project manager. Knauss is an architect for Swiss firm Gramazio & Kohler's professorship at ETH Zurich, a reputable science and technology university in Switzerland.
"The way the machine moves reminds them of something that's alive in a way. People like to watch it."
On Tuesday, Chinatown residents hauling bags full of groceries stopped to gawk at the bright orange contraption while bikers along the Pike Street bike lane stopped and took photos. Knauss and a team of architects will stay on-site in Chinatown until the wall is completed.
Such a robotic arm is typically used to assemble automobiles and perform other high-precision tasks, but Knauss said the accuracy, strength and speed of the robots allows them to create incredibly complex designs.
The bricks for the Pike Loop are placed one on top of the other and welded together by a resin that allows the wall to curve, lift off the ground, and intersect with itself in peaks and valleys.
"The designs we produce for the robot are actually so complex that a human could build it, but it would take a tremendous time and effort to get something like that done," he said.
The machine, he said, is programmed with unique coordinates to place each brick with in a specific spot with a specific rotation.
But Knauss assured DNAinfo that the machine won't be taking jobs away from brick layers.
"That's not going to happen," he said. "We're not interested in optimizing ways of production that already exist. We want to explore new possibilites and new technologies that at this point, would not have been possible."
The Pike Loop was conceived and produced by a team at ETH Zurich, with the help of the city's Department of Transportation’s Urban Art Program and Storefront for Art and Architecture, a contemporary art and architecture gallery in SoHo.
The wall will remain on Pike Street until mid-December.
