ABSTRACT
The Elytra Filament Pavilion celebrates a truly integrative approach to design and engineering. As a centerpiece of the V and A's Engineering Season it demonstrates how architectural design can unfold from a synergy of structural engineering, environmental engineering, and production engineering, resulting in unique spatial and aesthetic qualities. The cellular canopy grows from an on-site fabrication nucleus, and it does so in response to patterns of inhabitation of the garden over time, driven by real-time sensing data. The pavilion seeks to forecast how the so-called fourth industrial revolution of robotics and cyber-physical production systems enables the emergence of new structural and material systems. The fibrous composite structure of the installation only consists of two basic cells, the canopy cells and the column cells. The production itself is an innovative robotic winding process developed by the project team, which in contrast to most other composite fabrication processes does not require any mold, and thus reduces waste to a minimum.
