we have completed the fabrication and construction of the hub for sustainable arts and culture (saac) and city of sydney. it will debut at this year’s peats ridge festival and will be housing the eco living area which will host presentations and films providing information on living a more ecologically friendly lifestyle.

in terms of design, fabrication and construction, there were a number of important factors that implemented in order to create an efficient structure. maximum structural lengths, membrane offsets, membrane stretch and clash detection were all applied as coded subroutines optimised for the organization and construction of the structure.

due to the minimal 1.25mm thick walled circular hollow section recycled aluminium tubing, the maximum spans of 6.5 metres meant that each node location could adapt its position with respect to neighbouring node locations, providing a relaxation of the network. the same script could be applied to the membrane, adjusting for percentage of stretch inherent in the material qualities before creating the unfolded cutting template.

with 102 structural members in total, the part layout and stack order of each node required a large number crunching exercise to resolve intersecting geometry within a 1mm tolerance allowed by the structural engineer. there are 46 nodes across the pavilion with up to 7 stacked parts on each connection (7 connecting members produce 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 5040 permutations of stack orders) meant a large amount of possible combinations per node to review and resolve clashes – an unbelievable amount of variations when dealing with the entire 46 nodes.

after writing the clash detection and permutation script, the entire structure can be optimised and stack arranged within 2.1 seconds – demonstrating the power in scripting and parametrics and exhibiting the level importance that these techniques carry when faced with complex problem solving.

the structure only took the two of us to layout and assemble on site. it then required one person on each node to lift it to the correct height in order to fix the perimeter structure. once in place we made our way around each node tighten all the bolts and spigots in order to form a ridged structure.

now all that remains is for it to be skinned and inhabited. we are pretty excited about the completion of this project we will be given a talk on the design of the hub at peats ridge festival on the 30^th december.

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Tags: peats ridge festival, saac

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 24th, 2011 at 4:30 pm and is filed under design culture, fab technology, projects, we like. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.