
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.
Every city has under utilized spaces that create a series of serious negative effects. Waiting for major interventions, those spaces can be reactivated and revitalized with soft temporary projects: micro interventions that light up the attention, give new meaning and add a new reading to abandoned spaces.
In this article, authors call this kind of operations “plug-in design”, inheriting the term from computer architecture: interventions which aim to involve the citizens and activate the environment, engage multiple catalyst processes and civil actions. Plug-in design interventions are by all meanings experimental, they seek for interaction with the users, locally and globally.
Information Technology – with its parametric and site-specific capabilities and interactive features – can be instrumental to create such designs and generate a new consciousness of the existing environment. With this paper, authors illustrate how two low-budget interventions have re-activated a forgotten public space.
Parametric design with a specific script allowing site-specific design, materials and structure optimization and a series of interactive features, will be presented through Reciprocal 1.0 and Reciprocal 2.0 projects which have been built in 2016 in Italy by the nITro group.
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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