Revisiting Folded Forms with Digital Fabrication

Abstract

This paper discusses the potential of emerging digital fabrication techniques to produce material-efficient thin folded concrete structures. Although in the 50s and 60s folded structures provided a common optimal solution for spanning large distances without additional vertical supports, today, the number of these projects decreased significantly due to their complicated formworks and labour-intensive realization. Digital fabrication methods for concrete hold the promise to efficiently produce intricate folded mass-customized shapes with enhanced load-bearing capacity. This paper focuses on a robotic slip-forming process, Smart Dynamic Casting (SDC), to produce various thin-walled folded concrete elements with the same formwork providing smooth surface finish and gradual variations along the height. An empirical research methodology was applied to evaluate the fabrication feasibility of digitally designed thin folded geometries with one-to-one scale prototypes. Despite the discovered design limitations due to fabrication and material constraints, the exploration led to a new promising research direction, termed `Digital Casting'.