Elliptical Ways

Realization of Complex Forms by Means of Geometric Primitives and Planar Cladding Elements

Overview

Abstract

Construction projects almost invariably encounter a critical stage at the moment of handover between the designing and the executing party. At this point of the project, it is crucial that the design documentation encapsulate as much as possible of the design intent, being explicit in a way that allows for the party taking over to read the information with minimal ambiguity. Moreover, the design documentation needs to be developed with as much information as possible in mind about how an entity – at that that stage still unknown – might elect to execute and realize the design according to their specific capabilities. With the traditional procurement path of Design-Bid-Build, the ideal assumption should be that the Construction Documentation package speaks entirely for itself and leaves little or no room for interpretation. In the reality of almost any project however this is to varying degrees not the case, and designers need to employ certain strategies during the process leading up to the handover to attempt to minimize the possibility for information loss or misinterpretation. During the design stages of the cladding system for a large scale sports venue, measures were taken to devise global design geometry such that it can be described by simple and universal means, and engineer the discrete components of the cladding system to meet performance criteria while maintaining a clear logic of fabrication, transportation, and installation.


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Introduction

The Architecture Engineering Construction (AEC) community finds itself in the middle of an unprecedented upheaval of established norms, both from a design and delivery methodology standpoint. This comes with the

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Rationalization Explained

In mathematics, rational numbers are the subset of real numbers that fulfil the requirement

\[ I=\frac{p}{q}, where q \neq 0 \]

All integers are rational numbers, as are

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Building Description

The new Chase Bank Arena (Fig 5), currently in pre-construction, will be located in San Francisco’s Mission Bay. The building will accommodate over 18,000 spectators and is part of a

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Large-Scale Rationalization Process - 'Level 1'

The workflow between the architectural design and computational processing of the overall geometry necessitated constant coordination between the different team members. At the beginning of design development, the teams agreed

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Small-Scale Rationalization Process - 'Level 2'

The process of rationalization at a small scale begins with the Level 1 surfaces developed for the overall geometry as a primary input (Fig 8a). The purpose of this rationalization

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Conclusion and Future Work

While certainly preferable for a host of reasons, some of which have been briefly discussed here above, full replacement of traditional two-dimensional delivery of building design documentation by digital three-dimensional

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Acknowledgements

Golden State Warriors, Mortenson | Clark Joint Venture, MANICA Architecture, Kendall Heaton Associates, Magnusson Klemencic Associates, Enclos Corp.

McNeel Associates and David Rutten, Computers and Structures Inc. (CSI), Autodesk and the Dynamo team, Flux.io, GeometryGym and Jon Mirtschin.

The extended Walter P Moore team.

Rights and Permissions

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