AS6 – Spatial Structures

Title: AS6 – Spatial Structures
Type: Teaching Publication
Year: 2024
Course: BA Building Technology 2
Editor: Sherene Ng, Eike Schling
Published in: Architectural Structures Series

Preface

This publication exhibits the work created by undergrad¬uate students in their 3rd year during the core course „Building Technology 2“ at the Department of Architec¬ture, HKU, spring 2021.

The course extends the knowledge of structural design for architects. Through lectures and exercises, students learn about the behavior of folded structures, space frames, tensegrity and membranes, shells and gridshells, as well as highrises. The course aims to create an in¬tuitive understanding of the functionality of spatial struc¬tures, the ability to model and design them physically and digitally, and assess the materiality, construction, and tectonics of existing spatial structures, through analysis, drawing, modeling and presentation.

Students were asked to submit their hand-written notes after every lecture, creating an archive of individual sketches and notations, which is used in this publication as the documentation of knowledge. Furthermore, students encountered three homeworks during the semes¬ter: ”Folded Structures”, “Membranes” and “Tensegrity”, in which they crated group models and analysis of spatial structures to get a feeling for their behavior and design process.

This semester was built around three assign¬ments: “Tower Competition”, ”Building Analysis” and “Structural Design”.
For “Tower Competition”, students were asked to design and build a 90cm tall tower, which they analysed to predict its behavior for a vertical load in leaning condition of 30°. Each tower was then tested for it’s stiffness and load-bearing capacity with the class, moderating the deflection and failure criteria.

The second and third assignments ”Building Analysis” and “Structural Design” were closely linked to the Design Studio, in collaboration with Olivier Ottavaere. Students were analyzing and redeveloping existing Municipal Service Buildings (MSB) in Hongkong.

During “Building Analysis” , students were asked to create comparative drawings of the MSB with an iconic architectural reference project. The reference project was analysed digitally using Karamba3D, creating a simplified 2D diagram and highlighting the bending moments, normal forces, stress distribution and deflection, to draw conclusions on the structural behaviour.

During “Structural Design”, students developed individual design solutions for the Municipal Service Building, focusing on the structural design of specific materials like steel, concrete, timber, or hybrid. They used the digital tools to iteratively analyse and improve their design proposition. Students compared the structural mass, area and volume of their new design with that of the existing MSB, to better monitor their improvements. Finally, each student created a a 1:200 structural model, to exhibit the symbiosis of structure and space, as well as a 1:20 material section of the façade and structure to showcase how the materiality informed the space and function of their design.

Despite the short time and the highly technical tasks, stu¬dents managed to create architecturally and structurally sophisticated work investigating and designing complex architectural designs and building models. In this publica¬tion, we will first introduce the lecture series, and home¬work and then show the best 22 Structural Analysis and Individual Building Designs.