ITECH Timber & Flax-FRP Research Pavilion (2024)



This project was a collaboration between ICD and ITKE at the University of Stuttgart. The project was concept to realization of a lightweight pavilion, spanning material design, structure, fabrication, and assembly. Check out the full documentation of the project at the ICD's website .


Flax FRP
2D-Additive

Timber
3D-Subtractive


The pavilion sought to explore potentials of designing timber and flax fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) hybrid systems. These materials lend themselves well to being thoughtfully positioned in space, as both are fairly lightweight for the amount of load that can be carried.



The project spanned 1.5 years. The first semester was dedicated to material research, design, and structure and the second semester to fabrication and assembly. ~30 hybrid systems were designed, each with advantages and drawbacks that ultimately culminated in the realized design.



After a final design was selected, the team divided the work into five groups: design, structure, syntax, joints, and fabrication. I worked across two groups: design and fabrication.



The structure team worked to tweak the relative positioning of all the FRP and timber within the structure, ensuring the smooth flow of forces from the height of the pavilion to its foundations. The above diagrams depict the scaling of the fiber volume by the absolute moment, the tracing of principal moment directions in the fiber volume, and the strut placement and orientation based on perpendicularity to the fiber volume.



Once the structure was finalized, the syntax team composed the fiber layup of the FRP, the key to enabling the structure to be built in a way that it was most efficient. Above is a structural rendering of the compression & tension forces throughout the structure.



The robot lab was composed in two setups, one for the plate fabrication and one for the column fabrication. The plate was wound lying down, with a single robot reaching across to hook the pre-cured FRP. The column setup was more elaborate, employing hte use of dual robotic winding white the piece was held on a rotating linear positioner.



The fabrication of the pavilion took place over many months. It began with the timber assembly, then the wet-winding of the FRP, processing of the components, and the actual assembly of the structure.



The pavilion was displayed during the summer of 2024 on the University of Stuttgart's Stadtmitte Campus. During this time, the public was invited to reside in the space underneath it experiencing how these two materials join together.




Tutors (ICD):
Rebeca Duque Estrada, Fabian Kannenberg, Prof. AA Dipl.(Hons.) Arch. Achim Menges

Tutors (ITKE):
Tzu-Ying Chen, Yanan Guo, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jan Knippers

M.Sc. ITECH 2024 Students:
Kalaivanan Amudhan, Hamed Behmanesh, Clara Blum, Yağmur Bulut, Cornelius Carl, Paula Castel, Minghui Chen, Luisa Claus, Matthias Hornung, Che Chen Hu, Mohammad Mahdi Jafari, Simon Joller, Donghwi Kang, Arindam Katoch, Niki Kentroti, Rabih Koussa, Otto Lindstam, Luiza Longo, Samuel Losi, Laura Marsillo, Gonzalo Muñoz Guerrero, Kumaraguru Rangaraj Venkatachalam, Markus Renner, Seyedehgelareh Sanei, Jonathan Schill, Zahra Shakeri, Shirin Shevidi, Ceren Tüfek, Aysima Yavuz, Ali Zolfaghari.