
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.
In architecture, the use of Additive Manufacturing (AM) technologies has been primarily limited to the production of scale models. Its application for functional buildings components has been typically undermined by the long production time, elevated cost to manufacture parts and the low mechanical properties of 3D printed components.
As AM becomes faster, cheaper and stronger, opportunities for architectures that make creative use of AM to produce functional architectural pieces are emerging. In this paper by Felix Raspall and Carlos Banon, authors propose and discuss the application of AM in complex space frames and the theoretical and practical implications.
Three built projects by the authors support their hypothesis that AM has a clear application in architecture and that space frames constitutes a promising structural typology. In addition, they investigate how AM can be used to resolve architectural systems beyond structure and enclosure, such as data and power transmission.
The paper presents background research and contribution to the digital design tools, the manufacturing and assembly processes, and the analysis of the performances of the building components and the final built pieces.
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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