
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.
Brick construction has a strong tectonic tradition in architecture, being used both as a structural and as an expressive material. Despite several technological innovations at the composition and production level, its application still relies on talented craftsmanship, which has some natural human limitations and has becoming harder to find in the present days.
To overcome this problem, robotic assembly technologies have been introduced in the field, opening new design and construction possibilities. In this context, this paper by Rui Oliveira and Jose Pedro Sousa intends to examine their application but from a different perspective, by examining how they can be used to connect with the traditions in brick construction.
To do so, it presents and analyses the work of Portuguese architect Raúl Hestnes Ferreira, and develops a computational design and robotic fabrication research on the topics of corner, column and dome bricks. The production of a column design at the 1:1 scale using an automated process serves to reflect on the relevance of new technologies to innovate in accordance to tradition.
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.
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