
The Airshell Prototype
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
Using industrial robots in creative design has generated a wide interest among designers, artists, and architects. While generic, combined with custom or task-specific mounted tools and digital descriptions, these machines have recently become the vehicle of creative explorations in design, architecture, and the arts.
Even though numerous researchers and practitioners have proposed applications of robotics in architectural practice, this field is still in its infancy and thus needs more exploration by design and architectural researchers.
In this thesis by Ardavan Bidgoli, author has investigated the architectural robotics opportunities by reviewing its design space and characteristics in academia and practice. It resulted in a hypothesis stating that currently available software toolboxes are not sufficient mediums between architects and robots.
Accordingly, we need a medium to embed all the constraints that affect a specific robotic system, its mounted tool, and related material system, from early stages of design to materialization.
To test this hypothesis, author proposed an analytical grammar to codify spatial design, form finding process, and robotic fabrication behavior through visual computation and algorithmic approaches. The system affordances were later studied through physical prototypes.
This paper by Alessandro Liuti, Sofia Colabella, and Alberto Pugnale, presents the construction of Airshell, a small timber gridshell prototype erected by employing a pneumatic formwork.
In this paper by Gregory Charles Quinn, Chris J K Williams, and Christoph Gengnagel, a detailed comparison is carried out between established as well as novel erection methods for strained grid shells by means of FE simulations and a 3D-scanned scaled physical model in order to evaluate key performance criteria such as bending stresses during erection and the distance between shell nodes and their spatial target geometry.
In this paper by Frederic Tayeb, Olivier Baverel, Jean-François Caron, Lionel du Peloux, ductility aspects of a light-weight composite gridshell are developed.
In this paper by Julian Lienhard, Holger Alpermann, Christoph Gengnagel and Jan Knippers structures that actively use bending as a self forming process are reviewed.
Parametric Tools for Architects & Designers @2025
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