Responsive Parametric Building Free Forms Determined by Their Elastically Transformed Steel Shell Roofs

Abstract

The article concerns the unconventional architectural forms of buildings roofed with transformed shells made up of thin-walled steel fold sheets, and a parametric description of how they are shaped. Complicated deformations of flanges and webs, as well as the complex static–strength work of the folds in a shell roof, demand the creation of simplified models regarding the parameterization of such shells and their integration with the general forms of the buildings. To obtain favorable results, it was necessary to write computer applications because of both the complicated problems related to the significant limitations of the transformations, as well as the great possibilities of shaping shell roofs by means of directrices of almost free shape and mutual position. The developed procedures enable the prediction of shapes and states of all the folds in the designed shell. They take account of two basic conditions related to these restrictions, which guarantee that the folds encounter little resistance when matching their transformed forms to the roof directrices, and that their initial effort was as low as possible. The developed procedures required solving a number of issues in the fields of architecture, civil engineering, and structures, and are illustrated with an example of shaping one unconventional architectural form. The interdisciplinary study explains a new insight into shaping such forms.