
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.
The fabrication and construction of curved beams along freeform skins pose many challenges related to their individual and complex geometry. One strategy to simplify the fabrication process is using elastic deformation to construct curved beams from flat elements. Controlling the curvature of the design surface and beams has the additional potential to create repetitive building parts and a beneficial beam orientation.
In this paper, Eike Schling aims at strained gridshells built entirely from straight or circular lamellas of the same radius and with orthogonal nodes. The lamellas are aligned normal to a reference surface, enabling an elastic assembly via their weak axis and a local transfer of loads via their strong axis.
Author shows that the corresponding reference surfaces are of constant mean curvature and that the network of beams bisects principal curvature directions. He introduces a new discretization of these networks as quadrilateral meshes with spherical vertex stars and present a computational workflow for the design of such structures.
The geometric advantages of these networks were key for the fabrication and assembly of a prototype structure, the ‘Asymptotic Gridshell’. Author describes the complete process, from design to construction, presenting further insights on the symbiosis of geometry, fabrication and load-bearing behavior.
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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