Abstract

Shell-like structures allow to elegantly and efficiently span large areas. Quad meshes are natural objects to represent their surface, which can also serve for mapping other patterns. Patterns for these shells, vaults, gridshells or nets can represent the materialised structure, the force equilibrium or the surface map. The topology of these patterns constrains their qualitative and quantitative modelling freedom for geometrical exploration. Unless topological exploration is enabled.

Parametric design supporting exploration and optimisation of the geometry of structures is spreading across our community of designers and builders. Unfortunately, topological design is lagging, despite some optimisation-oriented strategies for specific design objectives.

Strategies, algorithms and tools for topological exploration are necessary to tackle the multiple objectives in architecture, engineering and construction for the design of structures at the architectural scale. The task of structural design is rich and complex, calling for interactive algorithms oriented towards co-design between the human and the machine. Such an approach should be complementary and empowered with existing methods for geometrical exploration and topology optimisation.

The present work introduces topology finding for efficient search across the topological design space. This research builds on three encoding strategies for topology finding of singularities in quad-mesh patterns: an intuitive geometry encoding, a direct graph encoding and a generic string encoding.

This doctoral research is a collaboration between the Laboratorie Navier at l’École des Ponts ParisTech and the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich.