HOUSE ME TENDER

Fall 2012

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Advisor: Olivier Ottevaere

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PROJECT STATEMENT

The project mostly focus on concrete as a (casting) material and investigate how various existing formwork procedures in the construction industry can be further experimented with and reformulate ideas for foundations, structure and spatial organization of a specific program.

A strategy for grounding will then be articulated as a first groundwork from which the emerging formworks system will perform. Direct intervention on its mass through physical operations such as excavation, foundation, earth retention and others.

The main pursue of the design process is to challenge the banal yet efficient building skeleton by prioritizing the emergence of new spatial possibilities and inventive structural performances, both as a working result of the casting procedure of the formwork system.


PROTOTYPE DESIGN

Earth-cast curved concrete slabs are tilted up to serve as shear walls for the 9-storey structure, which makes use of the slope context as a formwork construction site.

An analog model is set up to deal with the correct location and orientation of tilt-up slabs by identifying the Center of Gravity through natural form-finding and determination of optimal spots of slab casting and placement.

Strategic tilt-up and breaking of wavelengths from a modified site with optimal structural feasibility is implemented through optimal number of waves and precise location of tilted up slabs.

Slabs are better be shorter and include least number of waves towards the top of slope. Corrugation occurs increasingly towards bottom of the slope, referencing to Eladio Dieste’s out-of-phase tectonics.


PROTOTYPE ASSEMBLY

Fabric prototyping is chosen where frames and surface treatment of the formwork is experimented.
Carbon fiber is added to the concrete mixture to provide strong and subtle strength to prevent cracking and distortion.