ABSTRACT

Wood differs from most other building materials. Instead of being industrially produced according to the specific requirements of the building industry, wood is a natural tissue that grows in response to the biological requirements of trees. Achim Menges, director of the Institute for Computational Design at the University of Stuttgart, introduces three research areas that aim at advancing wood architecture through the integration and synthesis of fundamental wood characteristics in computational design, simulation and fabrication processes. The computational design process not only allowed for the integration of the elastic material behaviour, it also enabled the algorithmically driven, irregular placement of the joints, so that introducing local irregularity finally leads to global stability. In addition to employing passive material behaviour, such as the elastic formation introduced in the previous paragraphs, computational design and fabrication also allows for the integration of wood’s innate performative capacity of self-forming an.