
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.
Parametric modeling tools are increasingly adopted in design practice. Various plug-ins for Grasshopper – the most widely used parametric tool – allow the creation of mathematically originated geometries from environmental data such as solar geometry, wind direction and velocity, radiation intensity, illuminance levels, etc.
However, a critical look at the application of parametric methods in the practice of design reveals that their use is still predominantly based on aesthetical, structural and fabrication criteria. The opportunities that these tools offer to design strategies and components that are responsive to outdoor and indoor comfort conditions are starting to be explored at research level, but are rarely comprehensively integrated in the education and practice of architecture.
To investigate the links between parametric form-making and outdoor comfort, a workshop at the Royal Danish Academy – aimed at the design of shelters – combined Parametric and Environmental Simulation Tools (ESTs) with the use of the most recent Grasshopper’s plug-ins. Grasshopper’s plug-ins. In search of thermal and visual comfort optimization, the students
employed these parametric design tools to achieve responsive geometrical design solutions.
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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