Five huge timber vaults have been built for the 2021 Tianfu Agricultural Expo. StructureCraft created the production files for three of the vaults, Häring Timber Technology did the other two. The arches of the conical vaults all shared a similar buildup, yet all arches had different dimensions. The glulam beams were produced in Europe and sent to China by air-freight and train. To protect the beams during transportation, they needed to fit into containers. The maximum length was set to +/- 11.5 meters. Each of the arches consists of four glulam arches tied together with steel parts. I was responsible for the division of the arches into individual beams. I used EleFront to reference Rhino geometry in Grasshopper and Kangaroo for the optimization. Divided beams were baked back to Rhino with EleFront, allowing the addition of attributes. The beams were oriented from their position in space to the horizontal plane for further processing. In order to cut down the number of individual stock beams, more than 1000 different beams were sorted into similar sizes. Finally the curved shapes needed to be exported as degree 2 arcs and lines to be able to set up the press beds seamlessly.

Tianfu Agricultural Expo (structurecraft.com)

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