The research was carried out during research internship at Digital Fabrication Laboratory, Faculty of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Porto.  It investigates gridshell structures which tries to break from the more conventional grids patterns, by incorporating robotic fabrication to realize the complex construction and, eventually, exploring a higher degree of design freedom of its lattice. This research is a conscious attempt to incorporate some design qualities inherited from the past into the context of gridshell structure. Inspired from the layout of the ribs in fan vaults of English Cathedrals, the “Robo-Web” features non-straight lattice, which are knitted together following a well-informed standard design procedure to create an efficient shell surface. The research provides a unique robotically fabricated connection system as a possible solution for free-form gridshells. Various experiments were carried out in order to derive correct robotic fabrication process for such connections. A scaled gridshell was built in order to check the robustness of the proposed design and fabrication method.

Publication: A. Shah, J. P. Sousa, “Robo-Web: Design and assembly for a free-form gridshell”, in Proceedings of the IASS Symposium 2018, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, July 2018.