
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 Ongreening Pavilion
This paper describes the work of Ramboll Computational Design during the design and construction of the Ongreening Pavilion timber gridshell.
The structural approach involved form-finding bending-active timber laths, connected at intersections to form a doubly curved shell.
The resulting form was simple to fabricate and assemble, realised using 6.5mm thick Finnish birch plywood laths that could achieve high curvature while maintaining desired strength.
Due to the random nature of the final lath topology, the resulting structure was extremely stiff in spite of its low material weight, acting similarly to a continuous monocoque. The fully demountable shell was first erected at Ecobuild 2014 in London.
Bending active gridshells often have a rotationally symmetry cross-section, so that any torsion in the member does not effect the orientation of the connection details at member intersections.
For example, the Faraday Pavilion was constructed using fibre reinforced polymer tubes. For The Ongreeening Pavilion however, flat timber laths were proposed with a particular grain direction, thus adding an additional design constraint.
In theory, any doubly curved shape can be discretised into flat, straight laths so long as their paths follow surface geodesics [Pirazzi et al. 2006].
However, during the process of construction it is advantageous for each lath to take its required shape using a minimal amount of effort.
Numerical form-finding techniques for large displacements were required to understand the equilibrium of bending-active shapes.
A simple dynamic relaxation process using Euler integration was carried out using within Grasshopper with the Kangaroo physics plug-in [Piker 2013].
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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