Bending It Like Bamboo – The New York Times

Last year they published a paper, “Beyond the Basket Case,” investigating how to translate traditional weaving knowledge into computational design tools. Now they are exploring how to make the rules of weaving attainable at an architectural scale (possibly using robotics).

“There is a lot to learn from her in terms of the logic of the weave,” he said.

The plan for that Tuesday on the Minhocão was to build a dome from 30 strips of bamboo, harvested the weekend before from the hillside garden of James Elkis, a pioneer of the medium, who lives southwest of São Paulo. (Ms. Martin had seen his bamboo constructions online about 15 years ago, and when Mr. Elkis mentioned that he now makes bicycle frames from bamboo, Ms. Martin began twisting a strip into a wheel.)

The group — 27 aspiring young architects and urban and landscape designers from around the world — had done a practice run with their tutors on the weekend, with limited success. Their dome, woven upright, was skewed and pointy at the top, rather than round.

A crucial part of the workshop curriculum was “digital parameterization” — simulating structures on the computer and tweaking design parameters from one iteration to the next. For example, a key software tool, K2Engineering, designed by Cecilie Brandt-Olsen, predicts a material’s internal “bending stress” based on the applied force.

Mr. Solly, having crunched the bamboo’s numbers and consulted the paper model, proposed a solution for the skewing: the dome could instead be woven flat on the ground and then “popped up.”

Ms. Martin thought that bending the strips all at once might cause breakage. But they were keen to get a proof of concept, one way or another. Mr. Solly said, “We’ll carry a pile of bamboo up there and see if we get arrested!”

Setting out from the workshop’s base at Escola Da Cidade, a private college for architecture and urbanism, the bamboo caravan wound its way toward the freeway, occasionally breaking into song — “Believe,” by Cher, and “Evidências,” by the Brazilian duo Chitãozinho & Xororó. The group walked up an exit ramp, found a favorable site and began marking the dome’s 50-foot circumference in chalk on the roadway.

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