The BUGA Wood Pavilion in Germany is celebrates a new approach to digital timber construction. Its segmented wood shell is based on biological principles found in the plate skeleton of sea urchins, which have been studied by the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD) and the Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) at the University of Stuttgart. Source: Timberbiz
As part of the project, a robotic manufacturing platform was developed for the automated assembly and milling of the pavilion’s 376 bespoke hollow wood segments.
The stunning wooden roof spans 30 meters over one of BUGA’s main event and concert venues, using a minimum amount of material while also generating a unique architectural space.
The pavilion builds on the biomimetic principle of using “less material” by having “more form”, both on the level of the overall shell and its individual segments. In order to minimize material consumption and weight, each wood segment is built up from two thin plates that plank a ring of edge-beams on top and bottom, forming large scale hollow wooden cases with polygonal forms.
The bottom plate includes a large opening, which constitutes a distinctive architectural feature and provides access to the hidden connections during assembly.
The lightweight building elements are connected by finger joints. In the assembled state, the shell works as a form-active structure through its expressive doubly-curved geometry.
In this project, the co-design algorithms developed by the project team generate the shape of each element of the pavilion according to architectural design intent and structural requirements, while all robotic fabrication aspects are directly embedded and negotiated. Despite the incredible short development time of only 13 months from commission to the opening, the integrative computational process allows for the careful design of each building element in minute detail.
A transportable, 14-axes robotic timber-manufacturing platform was developed by ICD University of Stuttgart and BEC GmbH for production. The flexibility of industrial robots allows the integration of all pre-fabrication steps of the pavilion’s segments within one compact manufacturing unit. During production, each bespoke shell segment is robotically assembled.
The prefabricated shell segments were assembled in 10 working days by a team of two craftsmen, without the usually required extensive scaffolding or formwork.
All building elements are designed for disassembly and reuse on a different site.
The BUGA Wood Pavilion is located on the Summer Island of the Bundesgartenschau 2019.
