CAGD modeling of British museum great court roof for exquisite architecture

Abstract

In traditional architecture design, minimum energy surface and PDE methods have been widely used to design the roof and architecture of the building. This paper presents a general method to generate three-dimensional model from planar grid. In the process of British Museum Roof model construction, the paper utilizes many pairs of clockwise and anti-clockwise spiral lines and radials to construct the stable triangle grids instead of quadrilateral grids for their instability. Typical subdivision and interpolation are utilized in original grid construction. Fictitious forces are applied to relax the grids into symmetrical forms, and trinomial interpolation is used to construct the height of the roof. The resultant grids are organized; hereby the British Museum Great Court Roof is well constructed. This paper only considers and designs the "geometrical shape" modeling aspects of the British Museum Roof, and discusses the advantage of our method in constructing 3D mesh from 2D grid. It is more "general & convenient" in design and computation when compared to the William's methods. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.