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Swissbau Pavilion Inside view Node details


CAAD Swissbau Pavilion
Wooden pavilion with self-organised structure
2005

Awarded with the Holz21 Prize 2005

Organisation
I-Catcher GmbH
Basel
Ruedi Tobler, Felix Knobel

Geometry Consulting and Engineering
caad.designtoproduction
ETH Zürich
Christoph Schindler, Fabian Scheurer, Markus Braach

CNC-Production
Bach Heiden AG
Heiden (CH)
Franz Roman Bach, Hansueli Dumelin

Additional Information
Growing Mesh Quicktime Movie (4.7 MB)

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The CAAD Swissbau Pavilion was designed and built to show the potential of the digital chain on the Swissbau 2005 fair in Basel. It has the form of a sphere with two metres radius and reaches a height of three metres. It is assembled from quadrilateral wooden frames, each consisting of four wooden boards standing perpendicular on the surface of the sphere. But while in a traditional coffered dome a regular structure dictates the placement of openings, here the frames are required to adapt their size and angles to the deliberately asymmetric placement of windows.

To generate this adaptive geometry, an interactive software was programmed in Java that simulates the growth of a quadrilateral mesh on a sphere following simple rules: The edges try to align with the positions of the predefined openings and the floor level, while at the same time every mesh attempts to optimise its size and angles. The simulation of this process is running in real-time and can be influ¬enced directly by the user. Under certain circumstances the structure can locally alter its topology by inserting or deleting meshes until it reaches a stable state. The resulting geometry of nodes and edges is then exported to an XML file and used as the base for the rest of the digital chain.

The subsequent steps are analogue to the first two examples: a script reads the XML file into the CAD-software Vectorworks and generates a 3D-model of the pavilion with the exact geometries of all 320 wooden frames and their 1280 parts. All parts are automatically numbered and a second script arranges them on the raw boards used for milling. The G-Code for controlling the CNC-router is exported automatically for every board and already includes information for drilling the holes and milling the unique part-id into the boards.

Revision r1.16 - 20 Aug 2006 - 11:55 - ChristophSchindler
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