Abstract/Summary

This paper describes the design, fabrication and assembly of an elastic gridshell by staff and students at The University of The West of England (UWE) in collaboration with Format Engineers. Whilst timber lath gridshells are traditionally formed from a fixed topology with hinged connections, here all laths are bent and installed sequentially on-site. Whilst this method requires a more complicated assembly, a wider variety of freeform shapes could be explored to suit the constrained site location. The gridshell is formed from single layer thin timber laths following surface geodesics. This constraint enabled simple fabrication methods to be used despite the resulting doubly-curved form, which was partly shaped to counteract buckling. Non-linear analysis of the elastic gridshell is described, made possible using K2Engineering (K2E), a new plug-in for Rhino Grasshopper based on the Kangaroo 2 Physics engine. By integrating modelling and analysis in a common environment, critical buckling issues could be addressed by altering the gridshell topology live, resulting in a materially efficient but stable structure.