A computational approach for the mass customization of materially informed double curved façade panels

Abstract

Despite recent approaches to enable the mass customization of double curved façade panels, there still exist challenges including waste reduction, accuracy, surface continuity, economic feasibility, and workflow disintegration. This paper proposes a computational approach for the design and fabrication of materially informed double curved façade panels with complex geometry. This approach proposes an optimized workflow to generate customizable double curved panels with complex geometry and different material properties, and optimize fabrication workflow for waste reduction. This workflow is applied to four different fabrication techniques: (1) vacuum forming, (2) clay extrusion, (3) sectioning, and (4) tessellation. Four experiments are introduced to apply surface rationalization and optimization using Rhino and Grasshopper scripting. Upon simulating each of the four design-to-fabrication techniques through different iterations, the experiment results demonstrated how the proposed workflows produced optimized surfaces with higher levels of accuracy and reduced waste material, customized per type of material and surface complexity.