Branch 3D reposted this
The longest clear-span timber gridshell of its type in the world. The largest of the Taiyuan Botanical Garden Domes is a non-triangulated gridshell, resulting in our choice to use a light diagrid layer of nearly invisible, but carefully detailed cables and adjustable nodes to mitigate multi-modal snap-through buckling by stabilizing/organizing the buckling modes. A major challenge lay in how to tension the cables, given that they had to connect numerous nodes in a two way pattern. The problem was neatly solved by devising for each node a special casting with separate pieces joined with an adjusting bolt which could essentially “pull” tension into the cable net, by pulling the cables closer to the gridshell above, thereby lengthening the entire cable net. This project used an early iteration of Branch 3D to allow the thousands of complex part and piece drawings to be created rapidly. Delugan Meissl Associated Architects Photos: Light Chaser