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
What's the design thought process / solution for cleaning the interior of the glass surface, it seems like a lot of obstructions to get to the glass for cleaning.
Does the casting prevent the sandwiched beams to "roll" as well when faced with horizontal loads, ex wind?
Looks amazing! Is there any long term creep that will require future adjustment to the cables?
I'm not an architect, but as a random real estate professional that appreciates beautiful structures, this is gorgeous! 👁
It looks amazing, thank you for this interesting post
Beautiful structural detail, a true understanding of designing details for large scale timber structures. Fascinating!
Pretty Impressive. thats a detail I could marvel at for hours
Impressive geometry control
I'm very impressive!!
Architect at Alfredo Medina Architectural Services LLC | AMAS Architecture
1moJust curious, what does the third top layer of wood members do and why does it seem to have the same size as the bottom layer? That third layer adds weight to the structure. Couldn't this be done with two layers? One layer of primary members in one direction, and another layer of secondary members in the other direction?