Bsc6 Internship

Bsc6 Internship

February - May 2004. Toulouse, France

As a result of UVEclipse I came in contact with a small but innovative architecture company in the south of France. Their main speciality is 'tensile architecture', which means the usage of dynamic fabric instead of static materials such as concrete or bricks. Since so few people work in this area, there is very little 'standard' or 'default'. Every project has to be designed pretty much from the ground up.
Obviously the intuition of the architect is of paramount importance. If truly every detail had to be rethought, no project would ever make it beyond the drawing board. But they have. More than once. Hence the projects below which are all recent and some even today (early 2005) unfinished:

Roof construction at a highway toll-station near Toulouse.	A small part of a tensile roof for a shopping mall in Saoudi Arabia.
Central column of the same mall-project during construction.	A ring-section of the central column just after assembly.
An identical ring-section after a glossy finnish was applied.	FoamBeam Shelter tent prior to main inflation.
FoamBeam Shelter tent main backbone after inflation. Using inflatable tubes (air, water or foam), enormous tents can be erected within minutes.	The finished dome of the Sahara-mall project. This is a smaller and older project than Waves-mall (which is still in construction)

However I was not brought over in order to work on tensile designs. No matter how much sense and intuition one puts into a tensile project, there always remain a lot of boring, yet complicated tasks in computing the exact size, shape and cutting patterns of the individual fabric strips. Several algorithms had to be developed in order to lubricate the task of tensilefabric fitting. This was necessary for the company in order to create a flexible catalog of designs. This would drastically cut down the percentage of research investment in every design, although it would never quite become as low as with 'standard' architecture.

During the four months I spend in Toulouse, I worked (not alone of course) on several intricate algorithms, some of which are simply automations of existent, in-house knowledge and processes. These are not fit for public distribution. Others however are merely re-works of public domain theory and are therefore available from this site:

·	Surface relaxation routines (used in the form-finding process of tensile surfaces)

·	Geodesic curve routines (used in shape calculation of the FoamBeam backbones and the strip cutting process of tensile surfaces)

For additional information.