Project 1A: Fabrication-aware Timber Design

Project 1A has developed a modular suite of design and planning tools for timber plate structures. The aim is to ease the work of architects and engineers when designing timber architecture, automate generation of geometry (e.g., joints), expose fabrication constraints at early design stages, interlink structural analysis and integrate sustainability considerations. Building upon the work developed by constituent research groups Gramazio Kohler Research (ETHZ) and iBOIS (EPFL), prototypical case-specific computational tools for design and fabrication of timber assembly structures have been developed. This project aims to generalise the tools to make them market applicable, and to distribute them as open-source platforms for other researchers and in particular to users from industry (architects, engineers, contractors).

Project 1A comprises the following work packages:

1) Integration of fabrication constraints, representation for linear timber

2) Integration of fabrication constraints for timber plates

3) Software development, interfaces, plugins

4) Integration of structural analysis methods

5) Algorithms for assembly analysis and planning