
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.
From Typology to Topology: Social, Spatial, and Structural
Structural engineering science radically transformed its ontology and methodology from a typological to a topological paradigm. This implies a radical reset of the categories that guide engineering practice.
The modern forms of engineering rationality based on system types are now exposed as inefficient while the rationality of older structural forms based on slowly evolved traditions is now revealed by the new paradigm.
These forms – like the Gothic Cathedrals – often offer higher degrees of efficiency that were not verifiable via calculations before the advent of the computational revolution in engineering science.
Beyond this revelation and recuperation of premodern more differentiated and integrated solutions we witness the proliferation of radically new forms that the new paradigm makes possible.
This radical expansion of structural possibilities – mirroring the endless forms of nature – is congenial with the requirements of contemporary architectural design where a much higher degree of versatility is required to meet the challenges of a much more complex society.
We are living in an increasingly dynamic and complex world where social institutions, social types and identities proliferate, hybridize and indeed seem to blend into each other, into a continuously differentiated social texture.
Stable stereo-types dissolve and fixed hierarchies have everywhere given way to fluid networks, both in our private and our working lives. We might summarize this by saying that our modern social typology has given way to a post-modern condition of social topologyi.
This new fluid societal condition has a material base: the fourth industrial revolutionii with its ever more pervasive use of digital computing power crunching through ever bigger data sets in the quest for ever more subtly tailored adaptive product and service optimizations.
This new social life process is also demanding a new congenial built environment, equally differentiated and fluid; and naturally this new built environment can be delivered only via upgraded architectural and engineering disciplines that are equally empowered by the new digital computing powers.
The new condition implies that each new construction project is characterized by both complexity and novelty. Routine solutions are out of the question. R&D is now always involved. This implies a closer collaboration between the various contributors: developers, architects and engineers.
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.
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