
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.
DIGITAL – The ‘Digital’ in Architecture and Design
The digital in architecture and design refers to the use of computational design processes and their manifest effect on the architectural outcome, rendered or built.
Due to the continuous progress in digital design tools and methods ‘the digital in architecture’ is a moving target that can only be pinned down temporarily. My approach here is therefore at once historical and future oriented.
The digital is of course part and parcel of the technological transformations that sweep through all aspects of our civilisation impacting and indeed upgrading our lives via the digitalisation of all products, services and professional disciplines.
The digital in architecture is thus inevitable, must be understood, embraced and push forward. That this has to be explicitly emphasized in the year 2019 is rather sad and alarming.
My focus will here be on the discipline’s acquisition of new, sui generis design capacities in distinction to the mere automation of prior ways of design, i.e. mere digital drafting or mere visualisation is not of interest here.
A truly transformative ambition has been the hallmark of the avant-garde’s investment into the digital from its beginnings 25 years ago.
The new digitally empowered design capacities and repertoires that have since been elaborated imply indeed a new characteristic architectural language, and have manifested a new style with epochal ambitions: Parametricsimi.
However, an ambitious concept of style involves more than a new architectural language; it implies a whole new paradigm for the design disciplines, with new purposes, values and related design methodologies that are congenial both to the societal challenges posed and to the technological opportunities offered by the new digital civilisation.
The unprecedented level of dynamism in social interaction processes in contemporary creative industry work environments calls for adaptive, responsive and indeed creative built environments.
The discourse of so called ‘intelligent buildings’ has to be radicalized and related to the core competency of architectural design, namely the ordering of social interactions. If these patterns of interaction become increasingly variable this implies the demand for an unprecedented level of real time spatial flexibility.
This demand can be better met by responsive, or better still creative environments. The architectural elements that semiologically inform and order the social processes must themselves become active, intelligent agents.
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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