Masonry Workshop at ETH Zurich

A stunning Catalan free-form vault has been designed and build by students during a one week workshop organised by Prof. Deplazes and Prof. Block from ETH Zurich. RhinoVAULT has been used for the design of the complex compression-only shape. For details, visit the homepage of the BLOCK Research Group.

Gangnam Style by Ai Weiwei

A great parody on Psy’s hit: "Gangnam Style" : Don’t miss to visit Ai Weiwei’s Google+ account and youtube channel.

Philip Ball and Patterns of Nature

At the Advances in Architectural Geometry Conference 2012 in Paris, I had the pleasure to watch the keynote lecture by the science writer Philip Ball. He is the author of several popular books on science, including works on the nature of water, pattern formation in the natural world, colour in art, and the science of social and political philosophy. In three of his books Ball explictitly discusses the formation of patterns in nature : "Shapes", "Flow", and "Branches".

A similiar topic has been presented by Ball in February 2012 at the The New York Institute for the Humanities, a transcript of one of his lectures dealing with a similar topic can be found here.

According to Ball, one major reference for pattern formation in nature is the Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. The javascript applet below is a cellular automata inspired by the BZ reaction, with randomized input parameters.

Prototypical Institute Building at ETH Zurich

At ETH Zurich, currently a new prototypical building for the Institute of Technology in Architecture is being planned in a collaborative process among the members of the institute. An exhibition at Science City Campus, ETH Zurich, is presenting the current state of the project.

Video and image courtesy of ETH Zurich.

For the design of the roof, research conducted at the Chair of Structural Design has been combined with robotic fabrication processes developed at the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication to design a lightweight wood construction. The structural engineers are Dr. Lüchinger + Meyer Bauingenieure AG.

The Sequential Structure 2, a prototypical pavilion developed at the Chair of Architecture and Digital Fabrication, served as reference for the roof construction.

Paremetric modelling strategies developed at the Chair of Structural Design allowed for the direct inscription of structural constraints into the roof geometry.

Advances in Architectural Geometry 2012

I am looking forward to present my latest research at the Architectural Geometry Conference 2012. Download the conference program here. The conference proceedings can be purchased from Springer.

Tamedia Headquarters by Shigeru Ban II

New photos from Shigeru Ban´s construction site in Zurich, Switzerland:

A great detail: sheared node geometry, resulting from the chamfered corner of the building in plan.

Soccer: Germany vs. Greece

I am looking forward to the game tomorrow ... hopefully it does not end as in Monty Python's Philosophers' Football Match:


There is sophisticated mathematics behind the geometry of the soccer ball. Pieter Huybers, a dutch structural engineer, studied this field extensively and developed an optimized ball geometry with respect to roundness. He presented his work at the Structural Morphology Group Seminar 2011 in London.