STF#8 - 2023: Presentations
Building the Plane as You Fly It: Fabricating Facades at Extreme Scale, Speed, and Complexity
Front, Inc
It is often impossible to predict in advance the challenges that one will encounter throughout the design, fabrication, and construction process. Having experienced this over the course of hundreds of built projects, at Front we have developed an approach to computational design that emphasises flexibility, adaptability and problem-solving.
In this talk we will share how this approach enabled the design, fabrication, and installation process for the Lusail Plaza Towers - a set of 4 high rises consisting of 23,000 individually unique and 3-dimensional facade panels. Through our close collaboration with the facade contractor, we leveraged Rhino's inherent flexibility and robustness along with our adaptive digital infrastructure to tackle a series of challenges as they arose. Among the innovations we will share include:
- Representing the project as a networked collection of smaller models
- Advanced Brep-creation techniques for CNC fabrication:
- perfectly flush and tangential subtractions without Boolean operations
- data stored directly on the fabricated faces of the objects
- Automated generation of millions of fabrication documents, in traditional 2D formats as well as 3D formats
- Optimization of panel geometry that allows for fully 3-dimensional prefabrication in a factory-controlled environment
- Generation of thousands of Finite Element simulations which are use to train a Machine Learning model for reverse-engineering the flat shape of curved glass
Keyan Rahimzadeh is a Senior Associate at Front, Inc, with ten years of experience across the New York and London offices. With a hybrid background in engineering, architecture, and computation, he has realized complex façade projects around the world. His principal interest is the creation of innovative workflows –simulations, data management, automation, and so on– which enable architects, engineers, fabricators, and contractors to bring ambitious projects from design to construction.
He is also currently the lead developer of eleFront, a plugin for Rhino 3d that allows users to generate metadata directly in their parametric workflows, as well as tools that make it easier to manipulate extremely large models with millions of objects.
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