Terra Incognita

Terra Incognita - Fiber-Reinforced Textiles for Designing with Earthen Materials

In recent years, construction with raw earth materials has been rediscovered and praised for its sustainability, usually thanks to proximity, reusability, and lack of cement. Despite a significant increase in academic research on the subject in recent decades, there has been limited impact on standard construction techniques. Likewise, the available architectural typologies for earth have seen little evolution. Therefore, the building industry has relied on easily predictable concrete and the low labor cost associated with it to allow more freeform architecture. In turn, fabric formworks have enabled high-performance optimized shapes to be achieved with reduced wasteful molds and substantially more efficient falsework. What if clay-based concrete could also benefit from stay-in-place tensile networks? Integrating computational processes into clay-fabric hybrids (Fig.1) could streamline the building process, reduce the intensive on-site applications, and expand the restrictive design space. Thus creating two strong novel digital fabrication methods that generate more incentive for builders and designers to use sustainable locally sourced materials.

The morphology of the proposed hybrid is determined experimentally based on the shape-giving properties of natural woven jute fabric formwork. Tailored flax fiber reinforcement patterns are generated using a combination of FEM analysis, physics-based simulation, and fabrication-oriented features, resulting in a drastic increase in bending and compressive capabilities. Through prototyping and mechanical testing, a circular, materially informed design-to-fabrication workflow is proposed. This workflow is shown through medium to large-scale demonstrators to be applicable in two distinct constructive approaches, discretized or monolithic. Both can benefit from mass customization through digital fabrication processes. Consequently enabling the use of earth-fabric hybrids in non-compressive-only scenarios, supporting novel sustainable earthen structures.

ITECH M.Sc. Thesis Project 2023: Terra Incognita - Fiber-Reinforced Textiles for Designing with Earthen Materials
Esra Yaman, Maxime Fouillat-Siergiej, Weiqi Xie

Thesis Advisers: David Stieler, Hans Jakob Wagner, Katja Rinderspacher

Thesis Supervisor: Prof. Achim Menges
Second Supervisor: Prof. Jan Knippers