Fab-Cell : Aided-design tool for non-standard timber walls

Overview & Synopsis

The integration of computing language into architecture and engineering has been present since the 1960s but it only proved practical by the 1990s when modeling tools started to participate in an architectural shift that has conceptually mutated through the years. By then, the trend was called “blob architecture” and thirteen years ago, trends succeeding “blobism” were named as non-standard architecture. In the last ten years, academicians like Mario Carpo and practitioners such as Patrick Schumacher nested the terms parametricism, mass customization, and nonstandard architecture to define those complex –not necessarily complicated architectures created by using of digital tools and aided-manufacturing methods. This thesis is underpinned on the fact that using the non-standard approach in any architectural project needs more than just a plastic or functional intention but the means to translate that intention into actual buildable objects. The aims of this study are therefore oriented towards architectural elements using cellular-like patterns as morphologic resource. This work brings up an Aided-Conception Parametric Tool (ACPT) that actually helps designers to explore non-standard solutions to specific architectural problems regarding timber-built walls and envelopes. This ACPT is meant then to succeed architectural intentions in which geometric patterns –as morphologic modifiers- are used to provide walls and envelopes with a particular language (a cellular structure) that might require morphologic form searching (Carpo, 2015a) and topologic optimization by means of parametric generative modeling. The previously mentioned aims were validated by means of a full-scale prototyping exercise in which the first version of the ACPT is tested. Furthermore A series of modeling improvements regarding pattern generation, jointing calculation and fabrication simulation, helped fixing the difficulties found during the first validation stage in order to produce a set of Rhinoceros-Grasshopper (RGH) functional clusters that embody the early operational state of this ACPT called Fab-Cell