I am a senior structural engineer currently based in Montreal on the A30 project. I have a degree in Civil Engineering and a maters in architecture by the Architectural Association in London. Aside from the field coordination work I do at the Montreal office, I also teach at McGill as Adjunct Professor. I am going therefore going to show you very briefly some of the research I did as part of my thesis at the AA and the courses I teach at McGill.
One of the research studios at the AA focused on Biomimicry. Together with my colleagues at the AA we chose to study the architecture of the dragonfly wing. The pattern differentiation in the wing together with other mechanisms such as joints, varying E value, etc contribute to its high performance in passive flight. From a rectangular pattern to hexagons, natural evolution and environmental stresses have shaped the wings of dragonflies (similar to that of all organisms and natural systems)
This is the paper I have recently published together with my research colleague Sakthivel Ramaswamy. Its publication was funded through an IiA application and it was presented in November 2011 within the session dedicated to Biomimicry in Architecture at the ASME annual conference in Denver.
A video featuring the vibration study of the wing; video features mode 3 of vibration.
This is an Inflatable pavilion designed and fabricated as part of the AA Interprofessional Studio in May 2009. The geometry mimicks some of the findings of our Biomimetic Study of the dragonfly wing. Rectangular and pentagonal patterns are found at the base of the structure where greater stiffeness is required, while the hexagonal pattern is distributed across areas with greater curvatures which required to be more flexible.
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The following project is a Canopy for the Roof Terrace at the AA. The geometry was scripted using grasshopper and Rhino.
All the waving strips you see here were laminated The curved profile of the waving strips required a jig to set up and the strips to be ‘match cast’ to avoid looses in tolerances. Everything was designed and fabricated by students in less than two months time.
This is a render of one of the applications of my thesis project at the AA. The thesis developed a material system able to sense different changes in the environment, interpret these as stimuli and adapt accordingly to a new state of equilibrium. For example,, providing openings to allow for ventilation.
The material system used fibre optics to measure, a set of controllers to set up the actuation and a series of shape memory alloys. The later is a Nitinol based metal capable of remembering a shape previously set, when its temperature reaches a certain value. There are shape memory alloys for 25C, 35C, 60C etc and they are also supplied in different formats, wire, ribbons, plates, etc.
The geometry both at the local and global levels, was built up using grasshopper and a vbscript algorithm for form finding the global geometry.
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The project was presented at ACADIA in October 2010 and it was exhibited at Cooper Union and the Pratt Institute in New York.
We have also published part of the research in a paper at SimAud in 2010 and published the entire thesis in a book at the end of December with Lambert Academic publishing.
The following project is a pavilion for McGill School of Architecture. I had directed both the design and fabrication of the pavilion but it is the students of the school that have done all the detailing, scripting of the geometry, and all the real fabrication and construction work. The concept is based on the geometry of the mobius strip, in fact it is a double layer mobius strip and in the faces of this continuous surface there is a moire pattern applied with the intent of playing with the perception and appreciation of its visitors from different locations at Campus. The main structure consists of steel bars and plywood ribs, while the moire cladding is all done in thin plywood strips. All the plywood is CNCd at the school, the steel joints were CNCd cut and bent in a local shop.
This is the pavilion currently under construction… currently on hold due to cold weather conditions in Montreal
A close up of the bar/rib arrangment.
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And these are also some of the final projects my students did as part of the course in Advanced construction that I teach at McGill. They learn scripting and also a basic understanding of structural systems, based on graphical analysis of structures, including trusses, membrane, cable stayed structures, etc.
This is a half term assignment where they all scripted and fabricated a model mimicking the geometry of the roof of the metzpompidoucentre
One of this year’s project for a balustrade at Red Path Terrace, next to the Library at McGill.