
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.
Timber Gridshells: Design Methods and Their Applicaion to a Temporary Pavilion
This paper describes timber gridshell design methods and building techniques. The authors’ experience with such projects is used to highlight the advantages of timber gridshells.
Relevant built examples are presented and their formfinding and analysis methods are discussed. The relevance of the timber gridshell technique is illustrated by a recently built project in Cluj, Romania that builds upon previous knowledge and takes advantage of modern computational tools that are available for both architects and engineers.
Timber gridshells are a solution to the growing interests of free-form architecture in the context of an ever increasing awareness of the natural limitations of our environment.
The characteristics of timber gridshells – long-span, lightweight, affordable and sustainable – argue that it should be a perfect fit to some of the architectural programmes of our time.
However, their use has so far been limited to experimental pavilions and a few very worthy, large-scale, permanent buildings.
In this paper, we present existing gridshells that have answered the needs of architecture and discuss various methods used to design them, including physical and computational methods. We conclude by presenting a recent example that was informed directly by the construction process.
Shells are structures that are defined by a curved surface, often a doubly curved surface. Gridshells, also referred to as lattice shells or reticulated shells, are defined as structures “with the shape and strength of a doublecurvature shell, but made of a grid instead of a solid surface”.
Figure 1 shows typical elements of a shell and a gridshell. The materials out of which such structures have been constructed include aluminium, steel, timber, cardboard or glass-fibre composites.
As a result of the differences in the material, differences in the construction and assembly processes arise which lead to a possible classification of gridshells.
The timber gridshell technique was first developed by Professor Frei Otto and involves deforming a flat grid of identical straight timber laths into a doubly curved shape.
This is made possible by the low torsional stiffness of timber and by ensuring that nodal rotations are allowed. The deformation is possible in two modes, either starting flat on the ground, and pushing upwards, or assembling the grid above ground and lowering it using gravity.
Timber gridshells offer the attractive possibility of creating complex surfaces and spaces using a set of straight elements that are bent into shape. This makes them affordable and relatively easy to build.
Their design and analysis methods are diversified and have evolved over time. Computational possibilities are no longer a limiting factor in the design of timber gridshells.
A recent example, Pavilion ZA, was presented which was designed using open-source software by students. Form-finding for Pavilion ZA was based on the construction process and it is now possible to find the shape of a timber gridshell by simulating its real construction process.
It would also be possible to simulate and monitor a construction sequence. Even though specialised carpentry skills are usually necessary to achieve the long laths typically used, an alternative modular method was presented that has been used for Pavilion ZA.
The convergence of sustainability concerns and computational abilities makes the timber gridshell technique relevant now.
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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