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Hygro Design - Architectural applications of functionally-graded self-shaping wood components
Self-shaping wood is a new timber building technique, which presents significant potentials, such as material and process efficient fabrication and potentially novel structural typologies, as well as challenges, such as an unconventional material-driven design process. The environmental relevance is clear, not only for an expansion of the timber building industry as a whole, but for improvement of material efficiency, integration of diversified wood species, and expansion into applications still dominated by carbon-intensive materials. In these respects, self-shaping wood has demonstrated unique promise in projects such as the Urbach Tower, and the HygroShell.
This thesis attempts to go further, through the integration of multiple wood species (European Beech and European Spruce), a broader evaluation of potential architectural applications and structural typologies, and the development of a novel computational design framework for functionally graded self-shaping wood structures. Material experiments and typological analysis were employed, along with computational methods including object-oriented design, mesh relaxation, and finite element analysis, in order to make a wide range of developments. These include an improved understanding of the behavior of self-shaping panels with mixed spruce-beech active-layers and longitudinal curvature gradients; the selection of cantilevers as an exemplary typology and their subsequent structural analysis; and a C# class library and Grasshopper plugin interface for the design of self-shaping structures with variable species, curvature, and thickness. These developments culminated in the design and fabrication of a large-scale functionally graded self-shaping cantilever structure. This structure allowed for the detailed and critical evaluation of the techniques employed and also provided a window into real-world applications, which were further explored in a theoretical form. This thesis provides an expanded view of self-shaping wood structures as highly targeted and efficient material-structural systems, which respond to architectural, structural, and environmental demands through functionally graded natural material properties.
ITECH M.Sc. Thesis Project 2023: Hygro Design - Architectural applications of functionally-graded self-shaping wood components
Alex Reiner, Edgar Schefer, Aaron Wagner
Thesis Advisers: Laura Kiesewetter, Axel Körner
Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Achim Menges
Second Supervisor: Prof. Jan Knippers