Ceramic vault shading systems

Abstract

[Excerpt] Against the background of projects like the Armadillo Vault from the Block Research Group at ETH Zurich (Block et al. 2017), Solar Bytes Pavilion (Peters 2016) and the Al Bahar Towers Responsive Facade (Karanouh and Kerber 2015), a vaulted system was proposed based on the discretization of a roof surface in hexagonal blocks that aims to control the solar incidence by customizing the inner structure of each component. The project focused on questions such as ceramic mate-rial extrusion, ceramic retraction and the influence that variations in geometry have on those issues. The design optimization was achieved by geometrically varying the internal structure of the blocks. The design process was mediated by a computational model, taking into account the sun incidence data, resulting in a system that adapts the internal geometry of each of the blocks to suit their relative position in the set, making them more or less permeable to sun radiance depending on the space/time ratio that we want to shade. [...]