
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.
The combination of parametric design and single project models offers the architect a potent real-time tool to generate options and iterate the design to access the potential within a conceptual approach. Parametrics define the parameters of a particular design and not its shape. This is a powerful new tool in form-finding for architecture. A parametric definition of a circle is r2 = x2 + y2, and the parametric definition of the arch of Waterloo Station as defined by Robert Aish of Bentley Systems as hx = ((29152 + (B+C)2)0.5).
This is not to suggest that practices should all hire mathematicians, which Foster has done, nor that you should enrol for a maths degree. Thankfully, major software companies are developing visual interfaces or ‘self-programming’ for parametric design. The parametric capability within Bentley’s Microstation suite is called ‘generative components’.
Twenty years ago it was common for engineers to spend long tedious hours working out the way in which a two-storey building frame worked, longhand, on paper. Sometimes, ideas were incidental to the process. Thankfully, those days are past. The arrival of interactive design software has revolutionised the way we design things… It means that engineering has become more of an art, architecture more of a science, and all design more intuitive.
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