Ornamental discretisation of free-form surfaces: Developing digital tools to integrate design rationalisation with the form finding process

Abstract

The adoption of digital planning methods has given rise to an unprecedented formal freedom in architectural design. Free-form shapes enjoy considerable popularity in architectural production today. However, these shapes prove to be notoriously hard to fabricate. This paper reports on an ongoing research project investigating the approximation of continuous double-curved surfaces by discrete meshes consisting solely of planar facets, which can be constructed efficiently by using standardised, mass-produced building materials. We introduce our geometrical approach, which is based on the intersection of tangent planes to the surface, and present the digital tools we conceived to integrate the processes of design rationalisation and form-finding. © 2012, Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.