ABSTRACT
Despite the recent technological advancement in digital design and construction, there are more and more designers that tend to go back to nature and find their conception inspiration there. Architecture is the design made for people, the product of which should be affordable, sustainable, comfortable and aesthetically appealing. In order to satisfy these basic needs, this research is proposing structural systems driven form the analysis of natural biological shapes (Bionic) utilizing BIM technologies. Using nature as a stimulus for discoveries, and the model of learning from natural shapes are the main approaches for this research to generate an innovative bionic structural systems.
This paper focuses on analyzing and designing biological truncated octahedron shape for an initial building module. This shape (besides cubes) out of all of Plato’s and Archimedean solids is capable of closely packing any space. It is a 14-faced Archimedean solid with six square and eight hexagon faces, also known as Kelvin foam model. The study explores the architectural and structural efficiency of those proposed shapes in terms of their programmatic influences. Furthermore, the feasibility of more complex bionic patterns, to organize and determine the shape of internal and external spaces is investigated using the principals of Structure and Architecture Synergy Framework (SAS). The results of this research aim to provide architecture and engineering industry with innovative concepts that can be easily implemented into modular construction.
