Madrid Law Courts with Foster and Partners
Mediacite Liege with Ron Arad Associates
Emiliano Cevallos & Jalal El-Ali - Buro Happold


Madrid Law Courts

The roof of the project is created from a series of connected triangular panels. The initial design only created the external thus design surface of the building. The challenge was to find the material offset, meaning structural beams and nodes. The offset was constrained by a maximum distance and all the nodes needed to meet neatly in one point.

We developed an automated routine that optimizes the position of the structure. The original surface was automatically altered if limits were reached. The panels, structural beams and nodes were all automatically extracted and documented.

The process kept the design decision in the hands of the designer by allowing for a control over the form of the building while embedding the understanding of the fabrication rules.

Mediacite Liege

The Mediacite project in Liege is a complex roof structure comprising a series of compound curves which extend through the whole length of the building, creating an undulating form. The depth of the beams varies along their length, adding intricacy to the roof.

Our involvement was to automate the analysis of the beams, simplifying them to resemble a conventional beam sections and creating the G-Code for the machines to cut them. In principle we needed to create a series of infinitely small beams with regular sections that are readable by a conventional cutting machine to cut and weld them. The model is built using rhino script. All building information was extracted automatically. In the process we recycled Rhino Script routines, using them from the conception of the design all the way through to the fabrication of it.