Form Finding Lab

The BBC World Service asked me why sunflowers do not break in large storms. 

The sunflower, its features and applications in architecture

The sunflower demonstrates remarkable resilience to high winds through its ability to bend and sway, a behavior shaped by specific evolutionary features. These include its large, heavy sunflower head, a robust root anchoring system, a tapered stem, and the elasticity of its structure.

Large Sunflower Head: Positioned atop a slender stem, the sunflower’s heavy head acts as a concentrated mass. As it sways in response to wind, it creates a counter-movement opposite to that of the stem. This dynamic interaction reduces the amplitude of the stem’s oscillations, preventing excessive stress, and potential breakage. This principle of using mass to counteract movement has also been employed in some of the world’s tallest buildings to mitigate wind-induced sway. For instance, Taipei 101 in Taiwan, standing at 508 meters, features a 660-metric-ton golden ball suspended between the 88th and 92nd floors. Known as a tuned mass damper, this mechanism reduces the building’s motion by as much as 40% under wind loads, much like the sunflower’s natural response to environmental forces.

Figure 1: A sunflower head in the wind (left) and Taipei 101 perspective (middle) and its mass damper suspended between 88th and 92nd floor (right) (credit Annice Lyn/Getty Images, Richard Chung/Reuters).

Tapered Stem Design: The sunflower’s stem features a tapered design, with a larger diameter at the base and a smaller diameter near the top. This structural gradient is crucial because the bending stress is greatest at the base, where the stem must withstand the combined effects of its length and the horizontal wind forces. By having a wider base (and thus a higher second moment of area), the stem can better resist the higher bending moments that occur at the bottom. This principle is mirrored in architecture, where tapered designs are used to resist wind loading. A prime example is the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which stands at 829.8 meters. Its steel and concrete structure incorporates a tapered vertical profile to effectively manage the significant bending moments at the building’s base, ensuring stability under extreme wind conditions.

Figure 2: Burj Khalifa with its tapered profile (credit:AllPlan)

Elasticity of the Stem: The sunflower’s stem exhibits a remarkable combination of flexibility and strength, due to two key features:

1. Hollow Circular Core: The stem’s tubular design, with a hollow or spongy core, optimizes material usage. Most of the bending stresses are borne by the outer layers of the stem, leaving the interior largely unstressed and, therefore, structurally unnecessary.

Figure 3: Cross-section of a sunflower stem showing spongy material centrally (credit: http://www.quekett.org/about/outreach/2015-young-scientists-public)

2. Flexible, Pressurized Materials: The stem is composed of flexible materials that maintain rigidity through turgor pressure, similar to an inflated balloon. This pressurization allows the stem to return to its original shape after deformation, leveraging its inherent elasticity.

Together, the slender, hollow structure and the elastically strained flexible materials give the sunflower stem both flexibility and strength. This concept of flexible, efficient design can be seen in the engineering of tall buildings, which can sway several feet in either direction under wind loads without compromising structural integrity. However, while this movement may not harm the structure, it can be disconcerting for occupants, causing nausea and visible oscillation of objects like chandeliers—a phenomenon engineers must mitigate.

Lateral root anchoring system: Sunflowers possess a network of lateral roots that spread outward, significantly enhancing the plant’s stability. This root system distributes the forces caused by bending over a larger area, preventing concentrated stress at any one point. A similar principle is employed in the design of the Eiffel Tower, where the four legs are widely spaced to counteract wind-induced bending moments. Just as a person balances better with feet spaced apart, the wide stance of the Eiffel Tower reduces the forces acting on its structure, improving stability under wind loads.

Figure 4: Eiffel Tower Base under construction (credit: allthatisinteresting) and root system sunflower (credit: shutterstock)

What can we learn from plants for architectural applications?

Materials are expensive and form is cheap. Nature is lazy and operates efficiently, always striving to use the least amount of energy and materials necessary. In the case of the sunflower, wind energy is dissipated primarily through bending rather than stretching, as bending requires far less energy. Additionally, the stem’s circular, hollow core minimizes material use while maintaining structural integrity, resulting in a lightweight yet sturdy design. This principle of minimizing energy and materials is a key focus in biomimicry research, notably in the work of Prof. Julian Vincent (Heriot-Watt University, UK), who has extensively studied how biological systems like the sunflower, achieve optimal efficiency through minimal resource use.

Structural form resulting in lightweight design: The concept of using lightweight designs and forms to bear loads is far from new. Throughout history, humans have harnessed structural shapes to span large distances—whether for towering buildings, vast congregation spaces, or bridges over waterways. This tradition stretches back millennia, with examples such as the Egyptian stone pyramids, which utilized tetrahedral massive stone forms (3000-2000 BCE); the 43-meter span unreinforced concrete hemispherical dome of the Roman (2nd Century AD), the 32-meter masonry dome of the Hagia Sophia (500 AD); and the segmented stone arch of the Chinese Zhaozhou Bridge, which featured engineered openings to reduce weight. Other notable examples include the Inca’s suspended rope bridges (1500 AD), the stone cross vaults of King’s College Chapel (1500 AD, Cambridge, UK), and more recent structures like Félix Candela’s hyperbolic paraboloid reinforced concrete shells in Mexico and the gridshell cupola over the courtyard of the Dutch Marine Museum (Amsterdam, Netherlands). These designs reflect the principle of using efficient structural forms—whether geometric, like spheres and hyperboloids, or forms modeled by force—to span great distances with minimal material. Nature, too, often employs these strategies, as seen in the sunflower’s slender circular stem that efficiently supports its load. We also observe similar natural forms in folding, vaulting, ribs, and inflation, all of which contribute to creating effective, material-efficient structures.

Materials:  As I mentioned, nature not only creates efficient shapes but does so using the least amount of materials, since producing these materials requires energy. Nature’s material portfolio is far more diverse than that available to architects and engineers. In many cases, these natural materials must perform multiple functions—such as being strong and flexible while also transporting nutrients to support growth. In architecture, materials are primarily chosen for their strength and durability, as buildings are expected to last 50 years or more. This requires materials that can retain their full strength over that lifespan. In contrast, the lifespan of a sunflower, a herbaceous plant, is only one year, while a tree, such as the giant sequoia, can live for hundreds of years, showcasing the adaptability of nature’s materials to meet various longevity demands.

What other plants can offer features that would inspire and benefit architectural design?

Dandelions and storm surge barriers: The dandelion’s flowering stem, composed of a membrane, operates under high pressures of 5 to 10 bar. The prestrained membrane walls provide structural stiffness, allowing the dandelion to support its head with minimal solid material—just 7% of its dry weight. This concept, known as geometric stiffening, is also observed in inflated balloons. In fact, the geometric stiffening seen in dandelions is applied in the large-scale deployable and inflatable membrane barriers we study at the Form Finding Lab. These 8-meter diameter membranes, mounted on boardwalks, are inflated with air or water when a storm surge warning is issued. As the storm surge loading increases, the membranes deform and stiffen, effectively withstanding the applied forces.

Inflateable membrane storm surge barriers (credit: Form Finding Lab) and dandelions with a highly pressurized stem (credit:Inspirationmadesimple)

Conclusion

As we increasingly address issues of scarcity—such as the depletion of metals, rare earth elements, and water—we can also start to begin to recognize the remarkable abundance that nature offers. By studying and harnessing the innovative solutions provided by natural systems, we can uncover new ways to utilize these abundant resources efficiently. Embracing nature’s ingenuity not only helps us manage scarcity but also reveals the vast potential within the natural world to inspire sustainable solutions and foster a more resource-efficient future.

For all transparency: this text was edited by ChatGPT

Some disciplines like poetry, painting and music draw inspiration from emotions that revolve around the human heart. The movie “Engineering and Love” (Tonislav Hristov, 2014 ) reinforces a universally held concept that engineers inhabit a planet many galaxies away from planet Venus.  But it is less known that certain mechanically well designed and crafted artifacts have been crucial in the successful evolution of a love affair.

On the occasion of Valentine’s Day, I demonstrate how such systems can have a deciding effect on love using two case studies both described in literature.  The effect of the performance of Penelope’s bow is portrayed in Greek mythology and in paintings. The impact of Cecilia’s bias cut dress on stirring her suitor’s emotions is described in 20th century book and film “Atonement” (Ian McEwan, 2001).

Greek mythology portrays Penelope as the wife of the hero Odysseus. She is celebrated for her faithfulness and patience. For the 20 years, her husband was away during and after the Trojan War, she remained true to him and helped prevent his kingdom from falling into the hands of others. For example, she set her suitors the kingdom-challenge of stringing Odysseus’s bow which turned for mere mortals to be an impossible task. In Odyssey XXI (Homer) Penelope says:

“ I will bring the great bow of the divine Odysseus, and whosoever shall most easily string the bow with his hands, and shoot through all the twelve axes, with him will I go and forsake his house, which I think I shall yet remember, aye, in a dream.”

From an engineering viewpoint, the bow is one of the most effective ways of storing the energy of the human muscles and releasing it to propel a missile weapon. The energy that can be put into a bow is limited by the characteristics of the human body. In practice one can draw an arrow back about 0.6m and even a strong person cannot pull on the bow’s string with a force of more than 350N. This means that the most available muscular energy is around 210 Joules. An archer wants to store as much of that muscular energy in the bow.   

Assuming that the bow is initially unstressed and the string is slack (i.e. an unstrung bow), the archer starts to draw the arrow with a pulling force that is at first zero. The archer only works up the greatest pulling force when the string reaches its maximum extension (i.e. a strung bow). The energy put into the bow is represented by the area of the triangle ABC , which is no more than half of the muscular available energy, which is in this example 105 Joules. This is diagrammatically expressed below.

Homerus specifically writes that Odysseus’s bow was “palintonos” meaning bent or stretched backwards in ancient Greek. In other words,the bow was initially bent in the opposite or wrong direction, so that a considerable pulling force had to be applied before it could be strung.

The energy stored in such a palintonos bow is represented by the triangular area underneath the extension versus the pulling force shown below. The available energy in palintonos bow available to project an arrow (say 170 Joules), is much larger than the one in the unbent bow (105 Joules). Besides storing more bow energy, the palintonos bow design also overcomes the physical limitation of the length of an arm (i.e. the possible extension).

Eventually, Penelope held a contest for her hand in marriage. None of the suitors were able to string the Odysseus’ palinotos bow. Odysseus, disguised as the beggar, requested a turn, strung the bow, and shot an arrow through the challenge. He then turned the bow on the suitors, killed them all and revealed his identity to Penelope. The rest is mythology.

The second case study focuses on the behavior of the bias cut dress worn by Cecilia Tallis, one of the young lovers in the novel Atonement situated around World War II. The author Ian McEwan spent several pages describing the dress Cecilia chooses and wears on the eventful dinner which is the novel’s linchpin. The emerald, green dress, worn in the movie by Keira Knightley, is one most famous dresses in film in the last decade. The dress appears firm yet fluid and accentuates Cecilia’s sensuality.

Ian McEwan (Atonement, 2001) writes the following about the dress

“As she pulled it on she approved of the firm caress of the bias cut through the silk of her petticoat, and she felt sleekly impregnable, slippery and secure; it was a mermaid who rose to meet her in her own full-length mirror.”

Keira Knightley wearing a bias cut dress in the film Atonement (2007, Joe Wright)

McEwan refers to the dress being bias cut. In a dress fabric, the distinction between the material and the structure is vague. Fabric is a structure made up of separate threads crossing each other at right angles. This is called the grain and determines the way a fabric hangs and stretches. The grain can either have its main threads (i.e. warp) running top to bottom. This is called straight grain or lengthwise grain. Most clothes are cut with a straight grain. If you pull a straight grain cut fabric along the warp threads , the fabric extends very little and there is hardly any lateral fabric contraction as a result of the pull.  In Edwardian times, dressmakers resorted to laced corsets to show off curves because the straight grain fabric does not adapt much to the shape of one’s body.

In 1922 a Parisian dressmaker, Mlle Vionnet, invented the bias cut dress which does not need lacing and corsets. This is the type of dress worn by Cecilia in Atonement.  In a bias cut, the fabric is cut and assembled at 45 degrees to the threads. When subjected to the dress’s weight and to loads resulting from movements, the fabric oriented at 45 degrees to the horizontal, can stretch longitudinally and laterally like a scissor-hinged meshed garden trellis. The threads originally in a square pattern deform to diamond shapes. When pulled vertically under the fabric’s weight, these diamonds are long and skinny causing a longitudinal extension and lateral contraction of the fabric. The fabric’s large lateral contraction causes the desirable clinging effect in a curve-hugging dress. The bias-cut dress shows of Cecilia’s body and contributes to the chemistry that occurs between the young lovers that night.

Bias cut fabric, with its threads oriented at 45 degrees to the horizontal, elongates longitudinally and contracts laterally under gravity self-weight (left), Bias cut dress shows of curves and accentuates body movements. (right)

Although love and mechanics are often perceived as being at the opposite ends of human experiences, the case studies of the palintonos bow and the bias-cut dress show that mechanically well designed artifacts can play a key role in stirring emotions in the realm of love. I wish you a Happy Valentine.

Stephen Talasnik has always been exploring the intersection of drawing and building. His ongoing investigation explores the near seamless connection of drawing, sculpture, ephemeral site specific stage set, architecture, engineering and product design. In addition to major installations at the Storm King Art Center, he executed site specific installations at the Denver Botanic Gardens and Manitoga, the Russel Wright House in Garrison (NY).  In addition to a permanent all timber frame structure at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Montana, he has built indoor sets for performance at Tippet Rise, Architektur Galerie Berlin. His drawings are in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY). The Alebertina (Vienna), the Pompidou (Paris), National Gallery of Art (Washington DC), and the Kupferstichkabinett (Berlin) to name a few.

Sigrid Adriaenssens (SA): You are an accomplished artist who has always been creative and innovative at the intersection of drawing, sculpture, stage set, architecture, engineering and product design. You have described your own work as “Fictional Engineering”. Can you clarify what you mean by that term and how your work compares and differs from engineering?

Stephen Talasnik (ST): “Fictional” in this context refers to “mathless” or intuitive design. Everything that I build relies on two basic elements; the use of triangulation in creating an infrastructure and the use of intuition in building design, void of a preconceived notion of what the final product might look like. There is no finite ending which is a requirement of structural engineering. I have little or no idea of an absolute structure, therefore no preliminary sketch or need for “exactitude”. I use no measurement in creating the work, therefore it is without calculation. My work has little obligation to the fundamental responsibility of the engineer; I am instead consumed with a linear, gestural language of engineering without the implied requirements of function. Completeness of a structure is felt rather than measured. When possible, every construct must be visibly built by hand, relying only on the eye for a sense of aesthetic compliance. Fictional Engineering is a process in which the unfinished can be complete; therefore, I am a sculptor whose religion is the aesthetics of improvisational structuralism.

SA: Your newest show “A climate of risk/ the fictional archeology of Stephen Talasnik” just opened at the Museum of Wood in Art in Philadelphia. What concepts, ideas or emotions do you intend to convey through the large bamboo sculpture and the Glacial Mapping print in the exhibition?

ST: Glacier, the structural centerpiece of the exhibition, relies on two components; the creation of a system of wooden pine stick space frames, and the weaving of a flat bamboo reed skin that conforms to the physical dictates of the infrastructure. In its purest sense it is “skin and bones”. The objective is to build something strong, yet light and transparent. Like a three dimensional drawing, the piece is designed to seduce the viewer into the act of the “making” and in that sense, the viewer becomes part creator – challenged to visually deconstruct the structure. It is not intended to imitate a glacier but instead to represent the spirit of the natural form.

Glacial Mapping – also a work of fiction – provides the viewer with believable clues to a cryptic geological maze that engages the imagination. It is intended to be a blueprint, even though it serves as an unsolvable puzzle. Like any drawing — consistent with sculpture — it provides the viewer with an opportunity to assist in creating a personalized narrative. It is familiar and thrives as an artifice. Regardless of size, it is emotionally tied to the human scale, thus implying that the monolithic does not have to be intimidating or overwhelming; we are in a position to harness the majestic through the intimacy of hand generated construction. The final result must be a tactile labyrinth of line, whether hand held or room filling.

SA: What has been or is inspirational for your work?

ST: There are multiple arenas that inform the work; Architecture and Engineering, Archeology, Time Travel, Cinematography, and Biomimicry. I have a passion for variable repetition in organic growth and music like a sequence of seed pods or the musical note played over and over, both slightly altered by continuous progression. I am interested in the aesthetics of “diagrammatics” or pictorial symbols. The hand-made still seduces as it connects art to the maker. For several years I lived in the FarEast amongst people that survived creating functional structures using natural materials employing basic hand tools and homespun measurement. These constructs were essential for survival whether it was a house, bridge, tower, or boat. They served as inspiration for my formal studio explorations of drawing and building as linear constructs are the manifestation of three dimensional lines.

SA: What does your creative process entail?

ST: Striping away preconceived notions of the correct or finite. Thinking subjectively, not objectively; multiple solutions rather than the perfect solution. Infinite possibilities, I enlist the mantra of a disciplined “leap of faith” and don’t know where the journey takes me. I keep building with my hands until execution becomes automatic, like breathing. My goal is for infrastructure to be visible; not an unheralded part of the formula, hidden by the external skin of the structure. I want to get the two separate components – bones and skin – working in visual harmony.

SA: What can engineers learn from your work?

ST: Risk taking, persistence of vision, and the constructive harnessing of failure. Never rely on technology for the creative impulse. Trust instinct. Always draw ideas and if it’s easy, it’s not worth doing. I am not an engineer, I am a sculptor; therefore my advice relies on a set of givens that are void of the need to be functional. Look towards the endless possibilities furnished by nature, but don’t use it for illustration. Pull ideas through your own personal encyclopedia of life experience to find a new nature that can be more natural than nature itself. Seeking perfection is a curse and imitating yourself leads to your creative death. \ Hone those skills that serve memory and draw every day.

SA: What question do you never get asked and would like to be asked? What
would be the answer?

ST:

“Why don’t you use measuring devices that are readily available like
computer software in finding mathematical solutions in structure?”

I am not anti-technology. Without technology I could not have made the permanent structure,” Satellite #5” at the Tippet Rise Art Center in Fishtail Montana. In the case of that monolithic permanent structure, I needed to insure that it would withstand the elements, like wind shear and load. That sculpture existed first as a small wooden model in which I relied solely on my intuitive approach to building. I was pleased to find out from the lead engineer at Arup that the model I had made needed adjustments of only 3.5% to be realized in the scale of the finished product. That conclusion was the result of three dimensional \ digital scanning but my intuition was capable of making something that was almost structurally sound. Permanence requires responsibility of materials and design to withstand the elements of nature, which is probably why I prefer the arena of the ephemeral. A short term life that lives for only a moment in time and then disappears only to exist in spirit and documentation. The avoidance of digital technologies is not an act of engineering bravura. It is instead, a recognition of the capacity of the human senses to build through instinctual acumen.

You can find more about Stephen Talasnik’s work here www.stephentalasnik.com

Every day we are bombarded with scary proposals in the news about how robots and artificial intelligence will take our jobs. This year, we, at the Form Finding Lab, wanted to find out whether we can leverage future-oriented technologies to make the design and construction of structures more sustainable, more efficient to construct, more visually daring and more democratic. In particular, we have looked at the potential of machine-learning for design, robots, and augmented visual reality for construction. This journey would not have been possible without working together with excellent artisans, academics and designers at SOM, Taramelli, Cercaa, Princeton University, University of Bergamo, Salerno, Delft, Penn State University, IE University and EPFL.

We want to build visually more expressive structures without having to support them as they are being built because this reduces construction waste. This is a complex balancing problem of adding elements to an incomplete system that needs to be stable all the time, the opposite of playing a game of Jenga. By using machine-learning algorithms into our numerical form finding methods, we can now design such final stable structural geometries that embody all preceding stable geometries in construction. To put our new method to the test, we designed with artisans the InniXar vault at the IE University (Segovia,Spain), a tripod masonry vault, without supporting it during any step of its construction with success.

In contrast, humans and robots constructed the LightVault (London, UK)  together. The robots excelled at placing and supporting bricks in geometrically complex positions. But they could not feel and adapt their actions to the epoxy deforming between the bricks. Traditionally, artisans do sense and act upon such mortar or epoxy changes when constructing masonry.

Fig 1: Humans and robots collaborating in the construction of the LightVault (credit Maciej Grzeskowiak (left), Create Lab (right))

We started to think that in the construction process, we do not need to take a side in the humans versus robot side like the Luddites did in the 19th century.  The Luddites were a group of English textile workers who were afraid that new machinery would take their jobs. They expressed their fear and anger by vandalizing those machines in raids. Instead, we wondered how new technologies could empower us.

For example, in the construction of the Angelus Novus (Venice, Italy) and InniXar vaults, artisans wore augmented reality (AR) goggles to see the structure’s daring geometry and its construction sequence and discuss any problem areas on the actual site before a single brick was laid. No construction drawings could be found on-site (or off-site for that matter).  The artisans intuitively knew how to use the AR goggles and constructed the vaults accurately in a record time of less than 10 days.  A Swiss visitor to the Angelus Novus vault said that the vault had a human feel to it and that the craftsmanship was excellent.

Fig. 2: Visualisation through AR goggles of the InniXar digital design superimposed on site, realisation of the vault (credit: Wesam Al-Asali)

At the Form Finding Lab, we are just starting to scratch the surface of how we can best integrate these future-oriented technologies with more conventional design and construction approaches.  It seems that this is not a battle of humans versus machines but more about how machines can enhance humans so we can achieve our aspirations.

Fig. 3: Artisans wearing AR goggles positioning the bricks of the Angelus Novus Vault, perspectives of the completed visually expressive and structurally daring vault (credit: Taramelli, Adriaenssens)

Welcome back to the Form Finding Lab blog. With Halloween coming up, there is no better time to look at structural immersive environments that make us face and conquer our fear of the dark.

Halloween is my favorite American celebration because it is magical, teaches me not to be afraid of the dark, and fosters creativity. (I promised myself to not include pictures of the immersive Halloween environments we make in our neighborhood). About 2,000 years ago, the Celtic Samhain festival, marked the change from the harvest season to the winter, a time linked to darkness and cold. To ward off evil spirits, people lit bonfires and wore costumes.  19th-century Irish and Scottish immigrants to the United States transformed the Celtic Samhain festival into Halloween and incorporated more experiences such as trick-or-treating alongside its spooky elements.

My favorite spooky sculptural immersive environment is from the hand of Albert Szukalski, a Belgian-Polish sculptor. He interpreted Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper iconic painting in a hauntingly different light in 1984 at the Goldwell Open Air Museum (Mojave Desert, Nevada, USA).  Instead of thirteen detailed painted human figures, Szukalski’s sculpted figures are ghostly white fabrics draped over emptiness outlining and missing human forms.   Szukalski used living people as models enveloping them in plaster-soaked fabric that hardened around them.  Once hardened and the models removed, a polyester coat was applied to make the white shell durable.  This sculpting technique, which reminds me vaguely of Heinz Isler’s plaster hanging shell models, resulted in a frozen movement and expressive negative space, reminiscent of ghosts frozen in time.  The shells speak to the viewer who sees them as a living creatures, imbuing them with personality and intent. Besides this anthropomorphic association, which can also experienced in relationship to large-scale membranes and vaults, the viewer of Sukalski’s work is positioned amidst the negative spaces. Such an experience dissolves the boundaries between the self and the environment. This experience can also be felt in (neo) Gothic cathedrals and chapels.

For example, the neo-gothic chapel at Princeton University also offers such an enveloping experience because of its vaulted form and contrast between light and darkness. The negative space of the vaults creates a sense of height and spaciousness. The stained-glass windows, typical of (neo)Gothic architecture, scatter the natural light across the void in colorful hues creating an otherworldly atmosphere. When viewed at night from the outside, the windows become beacons of light in the dark, like the bonfires in the Celtic Shamain festivals.   The interplay between light and dark, created by the vaults and the stained glass windows, symbolizes the contrast between good and evil. Like Sukalski’s shell ghosts, the immersive environment of vaulted (neo)gothic structures also encourages us to overcome our fear of the dark. Happy Halloween!

Structural designers have imagined, designed and constructed urban forms that are large-scale and of single use, such as bridges and large-span roofs.  The main performance criteria of such structures are to resist the forces of nature, and to be economical.  In contrast to bridges, buildings are of relatively small scale, and have a complex human use; their form reflects the spaces people use. Their design and construction process is led by the architect, not the structural designer or engineer – and although the word ‘architect’ comes from the Greek word meaning chief technician, architecture and structural engineering have been separate disciplines since the Industrial Revolution (1740-1840). Initially, structural engineers, like Thomas Telford (1757-1834), only designed and constructed bridges and viaducts; they did not enter the field of building design. Their contemporary architectural counterparts wanted to retain complete control over the design of the entire building. Today, architects and structural engineers are expected to work together through the entire process, from imagining the concept of a building to its realization (and sometimes to its maintenance, dismantling or re-use), building projects are so complex that they need to be designed by a team of highly skilled experts, not by the mind of one designer only. The architect cannot act in isolation to give the client the best value for their money, and thus needs to design together with a team of structural engineers, environmental engineers, construction managers, and sometimes with geotechnical engineers, contractors, urban planners, and landscape and interior designers.  This ‘design by team’ process is never easy because of the conflicting objectives the building needs to achieve, and the limited knowledge and imagination of the different team members. Ideally all design team members would consider all relevant factors all the time in the entire process, but this situation never happens in real life. Nobody knows everything, and thus all team members must put forward many proposals. Structural designers draw on general knowledge and experience, understand specific circumstances and requirements, and also use their imagination and intuition to account for the various factors at play. In all projects, they artfully balance the different objectives to arrive at the right structural solutions.

To shed some light on some of the other challenges in the collaboration between the structural engineer and the architect, the different objectives for a building are worth exploring. According to Vitruvius (1st century BC), the Roman architect and engineer, who wrote ‘De architectura’ , a successful building must satisfy three requirements: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas, which freely translate to stability, utility, and beauty. For structural designers, the prime objective for each building is achieving firmitas, or stability.  The building needs to be strong, stiff, and stable enough under all possible loading combinations, and this at the lowest reasonable economic and environmental cost. Without firmitas, there cannot be any utilitas or venustas.  For the structural engineer, the challenge with this objective is twofold. First, one cannot desire ‘more’ or ‘less’ firmitas: the right amount, determined by the structural designer and building codes, is needed. The building should not be stronger than necessary because such an approach wastes resources. If the structural engineer points out that a solution is at odds with the laws of gravity or material properties, there is little the architect can do.  However, the architect should not take ‘no’ for an answer in every scenario; a structural challenge is not always a structural impossibility. The other challenge is that the client does not value stability for its own sake as an objective but sees it as a given. Just as one does not notice that one is healthy, the importance of firmitas is often only appreciated in its absence (such as in the devastating 2021 Miami Surfside Condominium collapse). Without a building exhibiting firmitas, the other virtues of utility and beauty cannot be imagined, achieved, and enjoyed. Structure unavoidably affects utility and beauty by occupying space with columns, beams, trusses, cross-bracing, etc. Alternatively, the engineer can free a building from these intrusions by introducing special and large-span structural systems, but this comes at a cost. Many conversations between the architect and the structural engineer revolve around the impossible desire to eliminate all structural elements to create open spaces, with no increase in cost.

Whether structural designers engage with built heritage or new buildings, one fact is universal: buildings leave a large mark on societies, natural and urban environments over the span of multiple generations. Within this very large spatial and temporal scale lies a call to action to the structural designer. The cost of the structure only accounts for 25% of the total building cost, yet structural materials make up as much as 75% of all materials in a building project.  The ‘structural’ share of embodied carbon in a building is thus very large.  Structural designers  must perceive it as a duty to contribute to a viable future for next generations, and intentionally tackle this structural share by integrating sustainability as a distinctive constraint in their design approach.

Elias and Yousef Anastas most recent installation, All-purpose, was exhibited at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Yousef is an architect, part of the AAU ANASTAS architecture studio with his brother, and an alumn of the Form Finding Lab.
One of their previous works, the Qamt stone bench, was featured previously in this Form Finding Lab blog post. Now, with the All-purpose installation, they highlight yet another way to use stones for construction All-purpose.

All-purpose focuses on differences and similarities, analogies that bring together cultures through architecture and by highlighting their non-hierarchical yet intricate dependencies. It challenges established relations of knowledge supremacies in order to imagine new possible ways of living together. The exhibition presents a new form of architecture that stems both from Palestine and from the world, investigates material explorations and architectural living spaces. All-Purpose, is an installation on the state of stone in contemporary architecture in Palestine.

While the change in the use of the material is largely linked to global transformations in the construction world, the exhibition is meant to present the evolution of the material in relation to contextual political, urban, and cultural realms. The intersections of global and local events are used as a way to better understand the present state of stone in Palestine as well as place its future in a global discourse on the use of the material in contemporary architecture.

The title of the exhibition All-Purpose refers to a known expression used for construction materials and/or products that are used for more than a single purpose as well as to the systematic consumption of stone in Palestine as a physical and symbolic matter serving multi-layered agendas. The exhibition will tie links between different scales, periods, and locations in Palestine and beyond as a way of blending approaches and place the use of stone in contemporary architecture at the intersection of local and global matters. In the disparate architectural context of Palestine, certain architectural attributes, originally found locally, returned to Palestine as imported elements. The exhibition challenges the common approach of imperial transmission of knowledge. Instead, it traces architectural elements and techniques beyond borders and historical periods.

All-Purpose builds up its content on Stone matters, a six year-long experimentations based research that formalizes into a series of site-specific stone structures in Palestine.

Authors: AAU Anastas and Isabel M. de Oliveira

In today’s Member Voices article, my co-instructor and visual artist, Joe Scanlan and I discuss the value of haptic learning for civil engineering students; why learning and working with their hands makes them better civil engineers.

The American Society of Civil Engineer’s Future World Vision calls for creative and motivated students to be attracted to the civil engineering profession so that they can bring novel solutions to challenging world problems. Civil engineering institutions of higher education have already successfully turned to problem- or project-based active learning pedagogies to prepare and retain these students.

In some courses we have co-taught, we have adopted a learning approach commonly found in creative disciplines. In these courses, students engage with physical materials and tools in creative and iterative ways, continually reevaluating their goals, exploring new paths, and imagining new possibilities. They make things, and they make them better. This creative process is variously codified as design thinking, haptic learning, and making things.

The benefit of making things for younger children in STEM education has been widely supported. But what about the civil engineering students in college-level  courses? They seem to be having fun, but what are they learning as engineers?

Creativity is key

One way of invigorating engineering education is to combine engineering with liberal arts, grounding students more firmly in creative and innovative design, social responsibility, and critical thinking. These three outcomes are key to forming our future civil engineers.

Creativity is key to unleashing new and innovative ways of thinking and solving problems. Human safety, environmental protection, and social justice are at the core of the civil engineer’s design sense and social responsibilities. Critical thinking allows engineers to see the bigger picture, and haptic learning – sensory, experiential learning – helps them understand the consequences of the decisions they make by requiring that they experience them firsthand.

Our belief in haptic learning is based on our observations and students’ reactions during a co-taught undergraduate course that integrates structural engineering and woodworking at Princeton University. This course, “CEE418/VIS418 Extraordinary Processes,” has been taught on an annual basis during the fall semester since 2015. The course attracts mostly senior students and is capped at 15 enrollees because of space and material limitations. The 12-week course has highly structured learning components through lectures and reading materials, along with less-structured learning components through lab sessions that are self-paced.

Knowledge and skill take place in the lab sessions and through individual and group assignments. The course prerequisites include “CEE205 Mechanics of Solids” and any other 300-level civil engineering course, and/or one 200- and one 300-level visual arts studio course. Practically, this means that the civil engineering students entering this course do not necessarily have any woodworking skills.

The course objectives are to: (1) comprehend mechanical properties of wood, specifically their relationship to moisture and temperature; (2) prepare, carry out, and process physical wood lab experiments that focus on strength and flexibility for different wood grain orientations and moisture content; (3) apply wood working skills and structural wood design principles to open-ended assignments; (4) organize, plan, make decisions, (re)construct, and create solutions to these structural sculpture assignments (haptic learning); and (5) evaluate the merit of structural sculpture based on esthetic and engineering criteria.

Making and thinking like an engineer

For each assignment in the course, students are given a rather vague and open-ended description. For example, open-ended problems have included the synthesis of acquired knowledge and skills in creating common objects like a prosthetic, a cushion, or a small-span bridge. When tackling these assignments, the students start using their minds in at least six different ways that practicing civil engineers do, such as finding a specific problem, system-thinking, visualizing, improving, solving problems, and adapting their work.

First, the students are finding a specific problem by clarifying which issue to address (such as deciding between a mobility or a dexterity prosthetic) and looking up the functional requirements and pros and cons of existing solutions. They also investigate the boundary conditions of the assignment. These limitations include the amount and format of wood (e.g., length of wood veneer strips and volume/area of wood boards), tools and connectors (e.g., Japanese handsaw, lightweight rotary and carving tools, wood glue, dowels, rivets) and time and workspace available.

Based on these constraints, they imagine a system and how they can not only make the system’s parts but also connect them as a functioning whole. This is system thinking, a habit of a civil engineer’s mind. As they sketch many practical solutions with pencil and paper, they critically reflect on conversations with us, the instructors, and with their peers. Using materials and tools, they move their idea from the abstract to the concrete and visualizetheir projects in three dimensions.

They continuously improve their projects by prototyping in cardboard and wood, more sketching, and relentlessly trying to make things better. For example, one student increased the bending stiffness of a beam element by laminating additional wood strip layers to it.

When they meet obstacles, we look at techniques from other disciplines and solve the problem creatively. For example, to establish the right flexibility for a veneer strip network cushion, the student looked at a variation of textile and basketry weaving patterns that resulted in different stiffnesses.

Throughout the assignment, the students adapt their work by testing, analysis, skepticism, rethinking, and changing. Adaptation, creative problem-solving, improvement, visualization, system thinking, and finding a specific problem are habits of an engineering mind. They capture what engineers do when they are in the full flow of engineering.

Our civil engineering students are not only having fun; they are developing engineering habits of mind.

’Making’ a better civil engineer

We are interested in developing and enhancing our students’ competence with practical skills that a civil engineer might use.

For example, students gain experience with hard physical tasks. In our course, they manipulate a bandsaw, make identical components on a table saw, assemble parts using clamps and cordless drills, and consider screws and adhesives to construct, modify, and repair parts in their systems. In the lab studio, students learn these skills at their own pace and progress to new skills according to their own comfort and confidence levels.

Every week, as we make our rounds through the space, we have conversations with them about what is working (and what is not). In doing so, we track each student’s progress, identify any gaps in skill or understanding, and give them one-on-one attention.

We see that the students become persistent in pursuing intrinsic goals. They are willing to attempt difficult tasks and understand the levels of effort required to achieve success. This personal judgment of “how well one can execute courses of action required to deal with prospective situations” is called self-efficacy. By successfully solving problems, students learn to determine the level of effort needed to achieve success. High self-efficacy has been shown to lead to persistence and a sense of belonging in engineering communities.

Our civil engineering students are not only having fun; they are developing engineering habits of mind.

Too often, civil engineering students are externally motivated. They want to obtain good grades, compete with one other, or earn awards. In this course, we notice that the students are internally motivated. They want to be challenged and master content, and they want to solve a problem and make it their own because this gives them internal satisfaction.

Research suggests that intrinsically motivated students prioritize and achieve more profound levels of knowledge whereas externally motivated students use more superficial processing strategies, such as memorization or guessing.

The role of visual arts

We would be remiss not to mention the role of visual art in this learning environment. As the title of the course makes clear, the enrollments for “CEE418/VIS418 Extraordinary Processes” have been an even mix of civil engineering and visual art students. Because of this mix, each group is not only exposed to the other’s habits of mind and working methods but also compelled to incorporate them into their own.

Thus, concepts normally attributed to visual art – beauty, psyche, idiosyncrasy, uselessness – come to bear on civil engineering students as well. In a word, the presence of art makes failure an option. When failure is a viable – even beautiful! – outcome, civil engineering students have the freedom to question and rediscover the “purpose” of their work, be it functional or beautiful or both.

The full article can be found here

We thank Dr. Sami Kahn, Executive Director of the Council on Science and Technology at Princeton University and the ASCE Committee on Aesthetics in Design for insightful conversations on this matter.

Last Saturday (16th of January 2021), I had the great fortune of participating in a fascinating panel discussion about what the next trends are for shell design and construction with the structural and math wizard Chris Williams (Chalmers University) and the architectural engineer Philippe Block (ETHZ). The conversation was a bit provocative but actually also very insightful. If you missed it, you are in luck because you can watch the event develop here