What is it about?
Curved building envelopes are difficult to manufacture, because construction material often come in the form of planar sheets. This article proposes a method to draw complex forms covered with planar facets, and to overcome the technological difficulties related to the construction of curved building envelopes.
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Why is it important?
The cost of building envelopes is essentially governed by the ability of designers to draw patterning with planar facets. The interactive design tool proposed in this article allows the designer to quickly explore many options that remain technologically-feasible.
Perspectives
I hope this article helps people understand the challenges faced by engineers and architects for the design of complex buildings and how it can be resolved through rather intuitive modelling techniques. As technical problems become more and more complicated, it can be tempting to solve everything with complex mathematical techniques. In reality, the people who have to solve the problems are not experts in optimization or mathematics, so it is important to give them tools that help them to construct an intuition of how problems can be solved rather than a blackbox.
Romain Mesnil
Ecole des Ponts ParisTech
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Marionette Meshes: Modelling free-form architecture with planar facets, International Journal of Space Structures, June 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/0266351117738379.
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