
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.
Precedent Based Design Foundations for Parametric Design
Parametric design systems serve as powerful assistive tools in the design process by providing a flexible approach for the generation of a vast number of design alternatives.
However, contemporary parametric design systems focus primarily on low-level engineering and structural forms, without an explicit means to also take into account high-level, cognitively motivated people-centred design goals.
We present a precedent-based parametric design method that integrates people-centred design “precedents” rooted in empirical evidence directly within state of the art parametric design systems.
As a use-case, we illustrate the general method in the context of an empirical study focussing on the multimodal analysis of wayfinding behaviour in two large-scale healthcare environments.
embedded design precedents lead to the (parametric) generation of a number of morphologies that satisfy people-centred design criteria (in this case, pertaining to wayfinding).
Our research presents an exemplar for the integration of cognitively motivated design goals with parametric “design space” exploration methods.
We posit that this opens-up a range of technological challenges for the engineering and development of next-generation computer aided architecture design systems.
Parametric design is a well-established method in several engineering and manufacturing design domains such as architecture, product design, and construction.
Decoupling form from physical structure, parametric and generative approaches offer the ability to rigorously explore many design alternatives and reveal new solutions during the design process.
They have been used to replace traditional shapes with more eccentric morphologies and provide adaptability and flexibility in the design procedure.
The Trade Fair ceiling project is an example of optimisation of the construction, while the Al Bahr Towers project dynamically incorporates environmental attributes into the design procedure.
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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