Archimedean Pavilion

thingiverse

This is a printable STL file of the Archimedean Pavilion. The Archimedean Pavilion is a ten-point-five-meter-long, six-meter-wide and three-point-five-meter high structure, installed on a wooden platform between the schools of Architecture and Building Engineering in the University of Seville (Spain). Like the Caterpillar project, this work combines geometric research and teaching innovation to create a generative model used as an Architectural Geometry exercise for students from both schools. The starting point for this project is the projective interpretation by professor Gentil-Baldrich (Gentil Baldrich, 1997) of Archimedes' proposition 12 in his work "On Conoids and Spheroids" (Archimedes, 1897). This proposition states that a planar section of a paraboloid of revolution produced by a plane neither parallel nor perpendicular to the axis is an ellipse. The minor axis of the ellipse equals the distance between two lines parallel to the axis passing through the ellipse's extremes. From a projective perspective, Archimedes' statement can be formulated using parallel projection defined by the paraboloid's axis direction. Any circle on a plane perpendicular to the axis projects onto the paraboloid as an ellipse, which is a planar curve. This property enables projecting any circle-packing arrangement onto the paraboloid for discretisation based on elliptical faces or rings tangent at various points. Working with this concept, the Archimedean Pavilion was conceived as an exploration of different spaces generated by four rotational paraboloids under certain conditions. The result is a single space enclosed by four fractions of rotational paraboloids discretised using projective interpretation. The main problem lay in materialising elliptical rings with enough stiffness for a porous rigid shell. The chosen solution used lightweight conical components (Narvaez-Rodriguez & Barrera-Vera, 2016), resulting in an efficient method compared to alternative solutions thickening the boundary. This reduced material usage by about twenty times. Each component consists of three fractions of conical surface, generating a triangular cross-section. These can be fabricated using laminar materials with laser cutters or CNC milling machines. Consistency between structural analysis and execution relies on correct joint execution: (1) surface seams not coinciding with generators, (2) joints ensuring continuity between conical fractions, and (3) connections at tangency lines. Though the system is designed for metal sheets or thin wooden panels, budget limitations led to fabrication using one-millimetre-thick HDPE sheets. Although laminar behaviour is similar, this material's non-linear deformation, temperature-dependent behaviour, and creep render it unsuitable for long-term installations. Sponsorship from Dow Chemical filled components with polyurethane foam, allowing the prototype to be exposed for a longer period.