Design of a Grid Shell structure with fabric formed concrete panels

Abstract

Very few timber grid shells exist around the world, despite their many advantages. The knowledge of designing, building and erecting grid shell structures is concentrated in very few people worldwide. Form finding, analysis and optimization are difficult. Erection also has many challenges - 2D plans cannot accurately describe 3D doubly curved forms. It is no surprise therefore that many architects and building professionals shy away from this particular building task. It is only in the last decade or so that computational tools for the design and analysis of grid shells have become relatively available. This has led to an increased interest by architects and engineers to investigate this building form again, as evidenced by the construction of the Downland and Savill Garden grid shells nearly twenty-five years after the construction of the Mannheim Multihalle. Therefore the aim of this paper is to present what has been done in the past, present computational form finding strategies and cladding options in order to create a body of knowledge that may be useful to others who are in the quest to find additional information regarding this unique building form.