MASTER OF ADVANCED STUDIES IN ARCHITECTURE
Specialization in Computer Aided Architectural
Student Pages
Dominik Zausinger
|dominikzausinger@student.ethz.ch | zad@an-architecture.de|
|Phone: 0041-78-9497018|
das sequentielle Tragwerk back to main page
software: Rhino, Python
together with: Jeannette Kuo, Sofia Georgakopoulou
links: http://www.dfab.arch.ethz.ch/
during the last term we participated at the project "das sequentielle Tragwerk" at the chair of architecture and digital fabrication of Gramazio Kohler in cooperation with the Block research group of Prof. Philippe Block
one of the most famous works of this chair so far are the curved brick walls which have been exhibited at the venice biennale for example. but they experimented as well with wooden wall constructions. these structeres have in common that they are all programmed in rhino and built by a kuka robot. the robot grabs the bricks, puts glue onto it and places it on the right position.
this years task was a step forward and quite ambitious: instead of pure stacking walls or columns the aim was to build a bigger structure that performs as wall and roof as well. some major problems that come along and we had to deal with have been how to divide the structure as the robot has a certain size limit it can build plus to be still able to handle the pieces. how to assemble the pieces together again to a bigger structure, how to assemble them as precise as possible on site, how to weatherproof it etc.
we worked together with Prof. Philippe Block to develope a vaulted compression-only structure to keep bending moments as small as possible within the system. to distribute the forces not only within the indivual spanning arches but as well diagonally a system with a diagonal-diamond-shaped pattern was introduced. this allowed us as well to step out of the rigid elongated tunnel like structures the pure stacking of wood would normally produce.
using the compression-only shape the script calculated the individual slats and out of this information generated the data for the robot where to put the glue and where to place the slats.
all of this happened within four weeks...