The temperature outside is a mere minus seven degrees Celsius, but Arno Pronk, hidden away in his office on the top floor of the Vertigo building, laughs at it. As the snowflakes whirl down, he talks about Harbin, the North-Chinese city he visited several times last month to supervise his most recent ice project: building a gridshell of 3D printed ice. Harbin, situated at the same altitude as Marseille, endures extreme cold wind directly from Siberia during winter. Temperatures often drop far below zero during the day, and an extra ten degrees at night. Not exactly pleasant working conditions, but for Pronk, these are the perfect circumstances for realizing his projects.

Early 2018, Pronk erected the Flamenco Ice Tower in Harbin, and later that year he and his team of students, in cooperation with the local TU, built a gridshell made of 3D printed ice there. When he tested its strength in early January, he was surprised to find that the construction only collapsed under a weight of over nine thousand kilos. “The construction is made of reinforced ice tubes with a diameter of seven centimeter and is much stronger than expected. I could never have imagined that these relatively thin ice beams would be able to carry so much weight.”