
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.
“Within contemporary architectural design, a significant shift in emphasis can be detected – a move away from an architecture based on purely visual concerns towards an architecture justified by its performance.” (Leach). Architects have developed and employed parametric design strategies to both address these performance related concerns and improve their production.
Though these strategies have improved architectural design, they are not being used to their full extent in the design process. Author propose taking the use of computers in aiding architectural design one step further; information and data should INFORM the project, driving the creation of a building FORM enabling it to PERFORM at higher levels than traditional design.
As architects continue to improve these tools, owners and developers tend to choose an opposing strategy. They often finance cheaply built (and poorly designed) buildings in an effort to reduce the upfront costs of the project. However, in economics reducing costs is only part of a sound financial decision.
The other half of the equation is increasing the revenue generated by the project. Author further propose that by investing in an informed design/decision making process, investors would be able to fund projects that perform better and sustain significantly higher revenues.
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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