
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.
While the design of the building’s geometry, in distinction to the building’s materiality with its tactile and visualatmospheric values, does not comprise the whole of the design task, geometry is certainly centrally involved in most of architecture’s relevant design decision tasks. Starting with Alberti architectural design has indeed often been identified with geometry – the distribution of lines and angles – in contrast to the builder’s concern with material realisation.
The use of geometry as such is the first stage in the story which therefore starts with ancient Egypt. The ancient Greeks achieved considerable advancement and refinement in both the science of geometry and its architectural application, but development slowed afterwards. Euclid’s Elements remained a standard up to the 19th century.
The expanded geometric ontology of Parametricism includes the new (related) geometric entities of splines, nurb surfaces, and blobs, and allows for operations like lofting (morphing) and the compositional principle of affiliative- 7 adaptive deformation. This radical ontological shift might be characterized as the shift from typology to topology.
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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