Woven Steel Pavilion

Full description

Background
Assembling structures from bent steel tube is a structurally efficient, lightweight and expressive approach to realizing highly articulated architectural designs. However the complexity of fabricating and assembling non-repeating and double curving components from bent steel tends to limit practical applications to either very wide tolerance sculpture or highly engineered public buildings. While numerous projects by Roland Snooks, Dave Pigram, Wes McGee and others have demonstrated the possibility of automating rod bending using one or more robotic arms, the challenge of assembling these structures still falls to traditional documentation and the dexterity of manual labour.

Contribution
The Woven Steel Pavilion is constructed from 16mm mild steel tubes hand bent into unique curving geometries by following holographic guides while using an analogue bar bender. The pavilion was constructed by a group of inexperienced participants during a 3-day workshop at the 2018 CAADRIA conference. Participants in the workshop also used holographic models to assemble the flexible bent steel parts into configurations specified by the design model, avoiding accumulative error and time spent checking 2D drawings. After construction, the HoloLens was used to 3D scan the structure in order to measure error and deviation from the digital model, enabling the project to make some of the first claims to high precision fabrication in mixed reality.

Significance
The pavilion was part of an invited international exhibition at Tsinghua University before being moved to a permanent site in Shanghai. A short video documenting the project has been played more than 13,000 times and received widespread international coverage on design blogs.