Form Finding to Fabrication: An integrative digital design process

Applied for the design and analysis of compression-only masonry shells, this research develops a fully digital design process -from form finding to fabrication. The challenge is to provide a smooth and efficient generation of different data representations of the discrete geometry of the force (or thrust) network for the use in structural and experimental modeling, discrete element modeling (DEM) software, or fabrication. The TNA method has been implemented in existing CAD software, offering fully interactive control of the boundary conditions, the internal stress field and the weight distribution of the shell. The discrete thrust network is linked to a NURBS surface to derive continuous geometric information, hence allowing e.g. the automatic generation of the shell volume according to its self weight.