An Interactive Computational Design Tool for Large Reciprocal Frame Structures

Abstract

This paper presents the detail of our interactive tool for designing reciprocal frame (RF) structures. In general, our tool addresses the RF design problem with three major steps: (1) it supports the design of RF-tessellation by connecting RF patterns and plane tiling; (2) it delivers interactive preview and exploration of RF designs in 3D space through conformal mapping; and (3) it performs a novel optimization method to arrange the rods in the RF-structures, so that we can ensure rod collinear contacts in the structures. This paper supplements our previous work with implementation details, user interface design and operations, as well as a preliminary study and various new results we devised from the tool. © 2014 Kim Williams Books, Turin.