Design Brief
The workshop design is a team effort and will happen in groups of 4-5 participants. Each group of participants will choose to design either a bridge or a canopy spanning the patio and pond area at the Tongji College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP) Building C. Thanks to the stepped topography, the site offers various opportunities for spanning and crossing the space.
In the past digitalFUTURES workshops, various bridge prototypes have been installed at this location, so we are part of a nice digital design tradition. Additionally, parallel to the current workshop a team of local Tongji students and construction professionals will build 2 simple knitted formwork bridge prototypes - of which the design is already fixed - in order to test materials, detailing and sequencing.
Each design should implement the technologies taught in this workshop, to say: it should implement as much as possible the ideas of structurally-informed and form-found shapes, as well as knitted fabric - either as such, or rather serving as shuttering for concrete shells. The design and analysis tools taught will prove useful for making the design. Since both knitted fabric and concrete shell structures are highly dependent on their supports, particular care should be given to the boundary conditions both during construction and permanent stages. Designs can be either conceptual or elaborate, but the overall feasibility and constructability are core aspects. During the workshop week, there will be opportunities to present the WIP designs and ask questions to the tutors. At the end of the workshop, on Saturday 03/07 afternoon, all participant teams will give a short presentation showcasing their designs.
Forming Teams
The teams will be formed by the participants themselves through the shared google spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h4abd0JryVxz_J5Ffr0Qz3i35VWsq3UnrpUGOwLDwFc/edit#gid=0 Each participant should fill in their data on the spreadsheet and join a team made up of 4-5 participants. The teams are identified by letters A-Z. Complementary skills, in particular a good mix of Python coding, engineering, and architectural skills within each group are encouraged. If you are not able to access the spreadsheet due to VPN issues or similarly, worry not! Let us know and we will enter your data in the spreadsheet for you, so you can be sure that you are in a group. In order to communicate between ourselves for forming the teams, we will use the 'group_forming' channel in the Slack workspace DigitalFutures2021 (for the link to the Slack workspace, see A1. communication).
Reference Literature
To get you started, you may draw some inspiration from the following sources regarding the use of knitted fabric formwork in design and architecture: Popescu, M., Rippmann, M., Liew, A., Reiter, L., Flatt, R.J., Van Mele, T. and Block, P., 2021, June. Structural design, digital fabrication and construction of the cable-net and knitted formwork of the KnitCandela concrete shell. In Structures (Vol. 31, pp. 1287-1299). Elsevier. Popescu, M., Reiter, L., Liew, A., Van Mele, T., Flatt, R.J. and Block, P., 2018, June. Building in concrete with an ultra-lightweight knitted stay-in-place formwork: prototype of a concrete shell bridge. In Structures (Vol. 14, pp. 322-332). Elsevier. Popescu, M., Rippmann, M., Van Mele, T. and Block, P., 2018. Automated generation of knit patterns for non-developable surfaces. In Humanizing Digital Reality (pp. 271-284). Springer, Singapore. Liu, Y. and Chai, H., 2020. Knitted Composites Tower-Design Research for Knitted Fabric Reinforced Composites Based on Advanced Knitting Technology.
Background Files
Attached here below is the Rhino3D background file of the project site, with bounding box included.
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