Simple Gridshell Form-Finding

A personal take on a project developed with students during a workshop for ZA2013 Architecture festival in Cluj-Napoca.

The workshop explored the some form-finding techniques for gridshells using Kangaroo.

A later revisiting of the definition prompted me to think about some form goals for gridshell and in particular a strategy to find the positions of the supports of the initial grid in order to determine a certain final form of the bent grid.

Here are the images from the workshop (all the original credits are in my article in the specialized section of this website)

1. Create grid

2. Start bending grid

3. Find gridshell shape

And here is the later day extension of the logic from 3 to 8 steps.

1. Start with a flat mesh.

2. Find a desirable coincidence form by relaxing the mesh with inverse gravity

3. Drape the form with a regular grid

4. Get the regular grid shaped as the base form

5. Trim the flat parts of the regular grid

6. Release the bent regular grid to find its flat shape while recording how the supports travel on the ground

7. Move back the supports on the recorded paths to bend the grid

8. Compare newly bent grid with original for to check for deviation.