Interlocking Shell (2020)
article⁄Interlocking Shell (2020)
abstract⁄With a specific focus on robotic stereotomy, two fullscale vault structures were designed to explore the potential of selfstanding building structures made from interlocking components these structures were fabricated with a trackmounted industrialscale robot ABB 4600. To respond to the economic affordances of robotic subtractive cutting, all uniquely shaped structural modules came from one block of material 48’’ x96’’ x36’’. Through the discretization of curvilinear tessellated vault surfaces into a limited number of uniquely shaped modules with embedded formfitting connectors, the project exhibited the potential for programming a robot to cut ruled surfaces to produce freeform shells of any kind. Representing nearly zerowaste construction, the developed technology can potentially be used for selfsupporting emergency shelters and field medical clinics, facilitating easy shipping and speedy assembly. Without using any scaffolding, a few people can erect and dismantle an entire mortarfree structure at the construction site. The disassembled structure occupies minimal space in storage, and the structure’s pieces can be transported to the site in stacks. Robot milling is a common technique for removing material to transform a block into a sculptural shape. Unlike milling techniques that produce significant waste, we used a hotwire that sliced through a Geofoam block to create almost no waste pieces. Since the front side of every module was concurrent with the backside of the next one, such a decision allowed to operate just one cut per front side of each module. In this case, by having three cuts, two neighboring modules were fabricated. The form of the structure and its modules emerged from the constraints of the fabrication technique, aiming to establish a feedback loop between geometry, material, simulation, and tool. By crossreferencing geometric data across Grasshopper, a customized tessellation script was made to breakdown a vault into its modular ruled surface constructs.
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| Year |
2020 |
| Authors |
Borhani, Alireza; Kalantar, Negar. |
| Issue |
ACADIA 2020: Distributed Proximities / Volume II: Projects |
| Pages |
226-231 |
| Library link |
N/A |
| Entry filename |
interlocking-shell |
