SMI 2012: Keynote Speaker: Freeform architecture and fabrication-aware design

AbstractFreeform surfaces play an increasingly important role in contemporary architecture. While digital models are easily created, the actual fabrication and construction of architectural freeform structures remains a challenge. In order to make a freeform design realizable, one usually applies an optimization process known as rationalization. This means its decomposition into smaller parts, thereby meeting two competing objectives: feasibility, and consistency with the designer's intentions. A rationalized design is the output of a possibly very complicated nonlinear optimization, and it is very hard to make changes to such a highly constrained geometric model. The speaker will report on recent progress in unifying the two traditionally separate phases in freeform architecture, namely (i) shape design and (ii) rationalization in view of the actual fabrication. In particular, we will discuss direct design methods for constrained meshes and related architectural structures, design space exploration based on local approximations of constraint manifolds and the design of structures in static equilibrium. Helmut Pottmann is Director of the Geometric Modeling and Scientific Visualization Center at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia. Prior to joining KAUST he has been Professor of Geometry at the Vienna University of Technology and Head of the 'Geometric Modeling and Industrial Geometry' research group. His research interests are in Applied Geometry and Visual Computing, in particular in Geometric Modeling, Geometry Processing and most recently in Geometric Computing for Architecture and Manufacturing.