Design Festival
One of the most interesting things about engineering design is materials and I was lucky enough to get my hands on some brand new smart materials at the 100% Design expo
the materials on a set date too. We had to have something that could be built in-situ so I think there are simpler designs which would have taken less time, but its scale meant it was inevitably going to have to be built from lots of components. We tried to have the biggest, transportable pieces already pre- assembled to reduce construction time.
Q. What were the real structural issues? A. Wood is an anisotropic material (properties dependent upon direction) and the main chords are actually laminated with the grain following the line of the members. We couldn’t afford to laminate all the braces so we had to deal with these not being as uniform. A big challenge is the trusses, which are curved into shape, however all their components are wavy so compression
members are actually pre-buckled. The red oak is also not normally used structurally and is common in joinery and flooring, so we had to structurally grade it, but it was very high quality timber. It was difficult geometrically too, we started off with a standard connection for all the nodes that was easy to assemble with some tolerance, but it also needed to be architecturally impressive. We had to work hard to get the connections to fit these parameters so we used plates with lugs at different angles for the braces as well as bonded rods (hidden) and fork/spade joints with pins so these were as visually unobtrusive as possible.
Q. Did the project challenge you a lot? A. I’ll happily admit it’s the most complicated project I’ve ever worked on. A subject of this
year’s festival was to push a material to its limits and I think that’s what the Timber Wave does, requiring a lot of engineering effort. Normally we try to make things as straight as possible, but as the geometry is so complex at the nodes we had to study the forces very carefully. We had to find ways to model it more simply because the connections in particular feature up to eight members meeting at multiple angles with multiple forces from each element. We used Grasshopper, a plug-in for Rhino 3D modelling software, which allows you to model geometry parametrically and AL_A were keen to explore that as well. AL_A actually issued the 3D model to Cowley Timberwork who manufactured the elements.
Two Lines is a collaboration between David 29
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