
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.
Masonry screen walls are brick enclosures that utilize oblongs and different patterns to create walls that act as screens to provide shade and natural ventilation to buildings. These walls are an affordable way to protect buildings in locations with hot and humid climates, like Paraguay.
While there has been much empirical innovation in the design of this type of brickworks in Paraguay, few studies have assessed their performance and established design parameters that can guide more efficient designs. Consequently, this project by Elena Vazquez, proposes a digital framework for optimizing the environmental performance of masonry screen walls through shape configuration.
The performance-driven system sought in this research goes beyond the rigid rationality of function, with a situated awareness that aims to include the particularities of culture, place, and the environment. The development of the proposed “smart” low-tech framework relies on several computational design methods.
First, an analysis of selected case studies is performed identifying the typical design parameters for these walls, formulating a design language. The design language is afterwards translated into a parametric generative system, based on the design and construction limitations defined in the previous step.
Afterwards, the parametric model is connected to a simulation engine and an optimization algorithm. The simulation engine measures daylight metrics and cooling loads, as an indicator of the performance of this passive design strategy. Finally, the digital framework outputs a set of designs with improved performance metrics, allowing the designer to choose from a family of optimized designs.
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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