Final yr they revealed a paper, “Past the Basket Case,” investigating the best way to translate conventional weaving data into computational design instruments. Now they’re exploring the best way to make the foundations of weaving attainable at an architectural scale (presumably utilizing robotics).
“There’s a lot to study from her when it comes to the logic of the weave,” he mentioned.
‘The free and sensual curve’
The plan for that Tuesday on the Minhocão was to construct a dome from 30 strips of bamboo, harvested the weekend earlier than from the hillside backyard of James Elkis, a pioneer of the medium, who lives southwest of São Paulo. (Ms. Martin had seen his bamboo constructions on-line about 15 years in the past, and when Mr. Elkis talked about that he now makes bicycle frames from bamboo, Ms. Martin started twisting a strip right into a wheel.)
The group — 27 aspiring younger architects and concrete and panorama designers from world wide — had performed a observe run with their tutors on the weekend, with restricted success. Their dome, woven upright, was skewed and pointy on the prime, quite than spherical.
A vital a part of the workshop curriculum was “digital parameterization” — simulating constructions on the pc and tweaking design parameters from one iteration to the following. For instance, a key software program device, K2Engineering, designed by Cecilie Brandt-Olsen, predicts a fabric’s inner “bending stress” primarily based on the utilized pressure.
Mr. Solly, having crunched the bamboo’s numbers and consulted the paper mannequin, proposed an answer for the skewing: the dome might as an alternative be woven flat on the bottom after which “popped up.”
Ms. Martin thought that bending the strips would possibly trigger breakage. However they had been eager to get a proof of idea, a technique or one other. Mr. Solly mentioned, “We’ll carry a pile of bamboo up there and see if we get arrested!”
Setting out from the workshop’s base at Escola Da Cidade, a personal faculty for structure and urbanism, the bamboo caravan wound its method towards the freeway, often breaking into music — “Imagine,” by Cher, and “Evidências,” by the Brazilian duo Chitãozinho & Xororó. The group walked up an exit ramp, discovered a positive web site and started marking the dome’s 50-foot circumference in chalk on the roadway.
