
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.
3D printing techniques (also known as additive fabrication) are maturing and increasingly being used as an alternative means for niche product manufacturing. These fabrication techniques are now being scaled up and adapted for full-scale fabrication within the construction industry.
While it has been suggested that construction 3D printing (fabrication of construction elements using scaled up 3D printing machines) could lead to significant advances within the construction industry, there are currently few examples of how such advances could be achieved at a building scale.
Although there has been significant effort invested in the development of construction 3D printing techniques, little detailed architectural design exploration has been published to establish methods for its application within the construction industry.
In this thesis by James. B. Gardiner, the central proposition is that further detailed architectural exploration, focused on design for construction 3D printing combined with off-site fabrication methods and digital design tools, is necessary to tease out the potentials and limitations of construction 3D printing techniques.
This exegesis is split into two parts; the first part presents background research based on interviews, site visits and literature review, focused on the topics; design, off-site fabrication, digital design tools and 3D printing within construction and parallel industries (aerospace, automotive, manufacturing and shipbuilding).
The second part of the exegesis presents case studies of three architectural projects, which the author designed, focused on design for fabrication using construction 3D printing. These case studies include: Freefab, a visionary design for a high-rise apartment building on Sydney harbour, designed in 2004. And two new architectural projects: Villa Roccia, a rock inspired house to be built in Sardinia and (in)human habitat a speculative design for an artificial reef in the Red Sea.
The original contribution of this research is in the primary field survey of practices and emerging trends within the construction and parallel industries. Original contributions are also made in the synthesis of selected practices identified from literature review and the field surveys to form novel design and construction methodologies. These methodologies have been tested through the design of unique architectural projects focused on fabrication using construction 3D printing.
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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