No abstract

Fabric formwork entails the use of fabrics as the main contact material for a concrete mould. The fabric is either hung or prestressed in a supporting falsework frame. Beams or trusses cast in fabric formwork are inherently non‐prismatic and have been shown to offer potential for structurally efficient shapes. The casting of beams or trusses in fabric formwork is a highly non‐linear problem due to the interaction of the fluid concrete with the woven, prestressed fabric material. Numerical models need to be developed for the engineering of these elements. To this end, it is demonstrated that it is feasible to integrate manufacturing constraints in an automatic optimization process. This is achieved by creating an automated computational framework that includes fabric form‐finding and finite element analysis, which operate within an optimization process that uses principles from biological evolution. The results show structurally efficient and manufacturable beams and demonstrate potential for optimization in general that explicitly includes fabrication considerations.

In order to directly make insightful which implications follow from structural design changes and to be able to adapt a structural design quickly to geometrical design changes made by the architect, the structural engineer may embed a parametric and associative design approach in the structural design process.This approach focuses on parametric modelling and the development of parametric tools which serve specific needs in the structural design process, allowing designers for instance to quickly communicate and discuss alternatives or to inform design team members of structural results of changing design parameters. The paper presents multiple projects within these categories of parametric approaches.They are concentrated on design and analysis with the goal of presenting practical examples of these approaches in structural design which were integrated in the full design process in order to benefit from the qualities of a multidisciplinary parametric and associative design process.

No abstract

No abstract