Architecture Design Studio 3: Air Journal Yifang Yin (Cindy) 387291

ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion 2010 – Stuttgart University

In 2010, the Institute for Computational Design (ICD) and the Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) designed and constructed a temporary research pavilion. The innovative structure demonstrates the latest developments in material-oriented computational design, simulation, and production processes in architecture. The result is a bending-active structure made entirely of extremely thin, elastically-bent plywood strips.

Material computes, making the bending test of timber possible...The locations of the connection points between strips needs to change along the structure, resulting in 80 different strip patterns constrcted from more than 500 geometricaly uique parts. It is very difficult to analysis the internal and external pressures and constraints with out computer program. However, in reality, there will be a lot more uncertain forces that can influence the stable of the building. Anylisising by com-puter will give us a brief idea for the structure of the building due to the computer is more reson-able for calculating the forces. In the virtual processes of computational design form and force are usually treated as separate entities, as they are divided into processes of geometric form generation and subsequent simulation based on specific material properties. The result are the combination of both the stored energy resulting from the eleastic bending during the construction process and the morphological differentiation of the joint locations enables a very lightweight system. The entire structure, with a diameter of more than 12 meters, can be constructed using only 6.5 millimeter thin birch plywood sheets. The use of compter, the more resonable of the result.

The use of computer, the detailed structural calculations...The computational design model is based on embedding the relevant material behavioral features in parametric principles. Of course that to define a large number of physical experiments focusing on the measurement of deflections of elastically bent thin plywood strips are impossible without computer. Especially for this design, it based on 6400 lines of code one integral computational process derives all relevant geometric information and directly outputs the data required for both the structural analysis model and the manufacturing with a 6-axis industrial robot. Without the data that provide by computer, how could we make the robot working for us?

Comparing the generative computational design process with the FEM simulation and the exact measurement of the geometry that the material computed on site demonstrates that the suggested integration of design computation and materialization is a feasible proposition.