
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.
DrAFT: an Algorithmic Framework for Facade Design
Architecture has always followed the times and their innovations and, currently, an architecture based on digital technologies has been emerging and has increasingly explored architectural facades.
In this paper we use DrAFT, a computational framework for the generation and exploration of facade designs, to explore a set of different examples of building skins.
DrAFT includes a classification of facades that helps in the identification of algorithms that best suits each design intent.
After combining the algorithms provided by this framework, the designer can more easily explore the solution space of the intended design.
Nowadays, the architectural facade is characterized by complex shapes and patterns, mainly, due to the use of new design tools (Pell 2010) which promote further design exploration.
The development of Generative Design tools, particularly, the use of algorithmic approaches, have had an important role in the generation of these contemporary skins because they simplified the design of complex and intricate architectural surfaces, which would not be viable to produce manually.
In addition, they also increase the design efficiency and their evolution has been changing, not only the design process, but also the architectural thinking (Kolarevic 2003).
Unfortunately, algorithmic approaches do not make facade design trivial. On the contrary, they require the rigorous specification of all algorithmic steps, a task that requires specialized knowledge and that, in many cases, can be quite complex.
In this paper, we propose a computational framework designed to simplify the algorithmic specification of facade designs.
In practical terms, DrAFT – Draft Algorithmic Facade Tool – promotes the exploration of facade designs and simplifies the adaptation of the generated models to the everchanging design process conditions.
Here, we present a collection of examples developed using this framework, thereby demonstrating its usability and flexibility in facade design, and also showing other possible applications.
Generative design (GD) is a computer-based approach to design that creates shapes through algorithms (Terzidis 2003).
Algorithmic design is a process that explores complex forms from simple and iterative methods/rules while preserving specified qualities (Meredith 2008).
For this, architects produce an intermediate algorithmic-based description of a design rather than its shape (Leitão 2013).
Parametric Design is a specific GD approach that generates different instances of a design, where each instance represents a particular set of values for the design parameters (Barrios 2005), allowing the designer to freely explore a large solution space of the design briefing/program.
Therefore, this allows architects to continuously evaluate several solutions, which would be difficult to do with traditional design methods.
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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