
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.
This thesis by Michael Patrick Makris, describes the development, testing, and findings of a Rhino-Grasshopper toolset developed to encourage real-time parametric design form experimentation through immediate integrated structural analysis feedback, allowing for structural optimization through iterative formal experimentation.
The performance-driven design toolset is a series of automated components that create geometry and simulate, analyze, and optimize triangular prismatic trusses in real-time for two main structural loading types: gravity and wind.
Each element is constructed, loaded, and simulated within the Rhino-Grasshopper design interface, returning structural performance information infographically in a native design environment. An optimization-assist tool is included that provides designer-centric information about proposed truss solutions such as cost, weight, deflection, and truss complexity.
In a series of trials of increasing design complexity, the toolset is tested and its accuracy is verified against benchmark structural engineering industry software SAP2000.
This thesis argues that, equipped with immediate structural performance information, designers can iteratively improve their architectural form and better understand the impact of form on structural performance, while still in conceptual design. Architects will produce more efficient, structurally informed designs when using this toolset over traditional conceptual design tools.
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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