Monumental's bricklaying robots build apartment in Almere

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Amsterdam robotics company Monumental released footage on Thursday showing autonomous bricklaying robots at a building site in Almere, where it says the machines have built an apartment. The robots worked from curved scaffolding, laying a curved wall in different brick types and bonds, with text indented into the brickwork.

Founder Salar al Khafaji presented the project as proof of range: curved walls, varied brick bonds, lettering pressed into the facade. The company says the same machines have since started work on an entire neighbourhood in the Groningen area — more than a hundred houses and a hotel.

Bricklaying has mechanised later than almost any trade on a building site. The trowel, the spirit level and the mortar bucket have changed little in generations, while the masons who use them have grown scarce and expensive. In a country where housing demand has outrun construction for years, a contractor short of bricklayers can either bid up the wages of those still standing or put a machine on the scaffold — and the second option only becomes rational once the first has become unaffordable. A robot that never tires, never ages out of the trade and never hands in its notice changes the arithmetic of what gets built, and of who builds it.

The Groningen project moves the claim from demonstration to delivery. A hundred houses and a hotel raised on robot-laid walls would be the first evidence at scale that the machines hold up outside a company video; a stalled neighbourhood would be the same evidence in reverse.

The Almere apartment, meanwhile, remains a company's account of its own product. The released footage shows bricklaying — the part of construction where pattern, repetition and straight lines dominate, and therefore the part a machine masters first. An apartment also contains wiring, plumbing, insulation, windows and a roof.

The film shows bricks going down in curves and bonds. What laid the pipes, the wiring and the roof of the Almere apartment is not on camera.