Extreme Living - Functional Unit Minimal Form & Efficient Structure
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Design of Ultralightweight Building Systems ¡ Jun 2017
Fig 1
Tensile Structures Mesh Relaxation
Student:
Group:
Tim Fischer
32
Minimal surfaces
Mean Curvature
Workflows and Review Coming to pass the term: 'performative design', I was happy to hear about the application and the opportunity it yields. To develop a mechanically optimized system, to adequately substitute or overcome outdated or inappropriate traditional solutions, suffering common techniques strikes me as a necessary and very useful undertaking. Aiming to envision a further step on efficient tensile structures, the involved formfinding process returned numbers of spacial displacement and a certain factor of narrowing the design scope, following initial decisions as an incremental workflow. The idea to utilize the computational strength 7 already in the first design steps arose to cope with this. Realizing that the motivation disagrees partly with the extent of the course, this investigation into formulating a tool to enabling this method of a "Volume to Tensile System" became a subsidiary goal. The design task for the semester had the application of extreme living. It was thought to be situated in a thermally hostile, extremely windy environment and to host two researchers as an outpost. This temporary structure should be used as an office and be functional also as their bedroom. 120 km/h Wind load and 30 kg/m² Snow load were to be imposed into and withstood by the system. Even though this post would be well suited, built with PVC- cushions, keeping in mind the 'volume to tensile system method', it was more interesting to investigate the purely tensile system, being the less adaptable to ridged forms. This road led to the investigation of bending active combined systems, where the boundary rods keep the structural membrane tensioned and the membrane returns the favor to the rods, thus each are keeping the other from relaxing - forming a temporary tensile structure. Still working towards the tool it was possible to build an algorithm that changes a meshes anchor points on given boundaries to meet desired performance factors.