
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.
Programming Material Intelligence: An Additive Fabrication Strategy for Self-shaping Biohybrid Components
This paper presents an integrative approach to adaptive structures, which harnesses the scale and strength of natural material actuators such as wood as well as the functional physical programming of material properties enabled by 3D-printing.
Passively actuated adaptive systems represent a growing field within architecture, and wood’s innate capacity for hygroscopic responsiveness can be instrumentalized for use as a natural actuator; however, the internal compositions of wood cannot be fully customized.
With 3D-printing, it is possible to tailor the internal substructure of physical objects. We introduce a material programming and additive fabrication method for designing macro-scale objects with anisotropic stiffness and elasticity of varying magnitudes using functional patterns, and embedding natural wood actuators into the synthetic 3D-printed structures.
In place of electronics and digital control, movement is encoded in the physical material and fabrication logic—demonstrating how self-shaping biohybrid components can emerge from a synergy of natural and synthetic materials.
Passively actuated adaptive systems represent a growing field in architecture and engineering. Many bio-based materials have the capacity to change shape based on external environmental stimuli such as heat or humidity. Wood is a sustainable, readily available, easily machinable, and high-performance construction material with a natural capacity for moisture-induced and direction-dependent swelling and shrinking.
By accessing this inherent hygroscopic and orthotropic behavior in a bilayer configuration, wood becomes a natural actuator that can produce shape changes in curvature through bending. This adaptiveness alludes to the potential for buildings to be more in tune with the fluctuating climate by automatically self-shading, self-ventilating, and self-stiffening in response to environmental changes.
At the same time, when used at increased size and thickness, wood can be employed as a self-shaping mechanism for the manufacture of curved timber components and larger structures.
The structural properties of wood specific to shrinking and swelling can be adjusted through densification, delignification, or chemical treatment. As a natural material, however, its stark anisotropic behavior within a sheet stock can not be fully customized. Tailoring the direction of hygroscopic actuation can be achieved by combining multiple boards into larger parts, but there are limits due to the existing structure of the material.
Meanwhile, 3D-printing has enabled the tuning of material properties and functionalities through the manufacture of compliant mechanisms with tailored internal substructures.
3D-printed mechanical metamaterials with a range of functions, from elastic patterns to double curvature to thermally actuated mechanisms, have been researched; but existing literature shows that these laboratory prototypes lack the scale, high swelling force, and actuation speed necessary for some building applications.
Biohybrid parts which move in response to the changing weather without electrical power can potentially serve as a solution to energy-efficient indoor climate control. Although we have shown self-shaping at a range of spatial scales, the adoption of biohybrid components in buildings will require further exploration of the additional functionalities which are enabled by this material programming and additive fabrication approach.
For the application of responsive facades that can manage the indoor climate, it will be necessary to overcome the poro elastic time scale. In the case of irreversible self-shaping such as in deployable structures and shells, safety mechanisms for locking the desired shape change will need to be investigated.
Beyond the use of wood, other combinations of natural material actuators and synthetic material programming could be particularly interesting for large-scale self-shaping systems.
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
No account yet?
Create an Account