
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.
Kangaroo Physics, a physical simulation engine, is amongst the most used form-finding tool with nearly 500 000 downloads. Mostly resorted to by users with moderate computation skills, it provides a simplified interface for an advanced simulation tool. It is a Particle Spring System relying on the Dynamic Relaxation method and offering a wide design space.
Thanks to the visual scripting interface provided by Grasshopper, the user has access to a fixed set of physical “goals” and unitless variables, without having to work with more complex aspects of the Kangaroo physical model. This setup induces a disconnection between the user and the physical model with its variables.
The goal of this research by Florian Chéraud is to introduce, within the Grasshopper environment, a tensile parameter, the Young Modulus, into the Kangaroo model. Thus, while preserving the design freedom of the plug-in, a better understanding of the physical behaviour modelled in Kangaroo is offered to neophytes, as well as better control of material properties.
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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