This topic explores, folded surfaces, and looks at how to design a structure using cardboard as a material by taking advantage of its material behavior and properties.

The folded surfaces were implemented into a cantilever design which also serves as a structural element.  The pavilion was designed with a Voronoi pattern and inspired by nature.  Voronoi pattern has strong, structural mechanical properties due it’s given  geometry.

First the shape was made with computational design using grasshopper and the plug-in, kangaroo.  When subjected to a structural load, the cantilever can carry the load to the supports where there is  force  against a moment and shear stress.

In order to understand the exact distribution of the pattern, structural analysis were made made using another plugin, Karamba3d.  This was done using  compression and tension zones + force flow lines. Following this protocol, the final shape was designed with 121 unique voronoi boxes to  shape the cantilever structure.

The production and fabrication phase included laser cutting, assembling individual boxes and finally the whole structure.  78 sheets of cardboard were laser cut and assembled.  The total surface area is 9.05 sqm and estimated weight of 4.41kg.

CANTILEVER is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
developed at Master in Advanced Architecture, in 2017 by:
Students: Ricardo Mayor Luque, Zrinka Radic, Guoliang Zhang, Javier Lopez Alascio, Melissa Sherrod
Faculty: Silvia Brandi /  Computational design: Rodrigo Aguirre
Assistant. Abdullah Ibrahim, Jayant Khanuja