Morphogenesis of curved strutural envelopes - Presentation of the PhD work of Xavier Tellier

<p>This video is a recording of a live presentation of the&nbsp;PhD work of Xavier Tellier. It is also hosted at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4Hetw9lnY">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iw4Hetw9lnY</a>. Here is a summary of the dissertation:</p> <p>Curved structural envelopes combine mechanical efficiency, architectural potential and a wide design space to fulfill functional and environment goals. The main barrier to their use is the complexity of manufacturing, assembly and design. Significant progress has been made recently in the field of architectural geometry to tackle this issue, but many challenges remain. In particular, the following problem is recurrent in a designer&rsquo;s perspective: Given a constructive system, what are the possible shapes, and how to reach them in an intuitive fashion?</p> <p>This thesis presents a panorama of morphogenesis (i.e shape creation) methods under fabrication constraints. It then introduces four new methods to generate families of surfaces with particular geometrical properties which can significantly simplify the manufacturing of curved structures. Most common typologies are considered:&nbsp; gridshells, plated shells, membranes and funicular vaults. A particular attention is devoted to how surfaces are controlled in order to guaranty an intuitive generation.</p> <p>Two of the proposed families allow to design novel structural systems, while the two others combine fabrication properties with inherent mechanical efficiency. The feasibility of these new structural morphologies is demonstrated by the construction of two pavilions.</p>