Finding and Fabric Forming

Renewed interest and recently expanding research of ‘fabric forming’ as a means of producing concrete (or rammed earth) structures has established its benefits in physically manifesting complex curvatures, achieving good surface quality, ease of transport of form-work materials (Cauberg et al., 2009), producing sculptural forms of variable crosssection and buckling resistant forms (West and Araya, 2009), and reduction of form-work materials and thus cost (Veenendaal, 2011). As a contemporary practise with profound affinity to sculptural forms and engaged in architectural production across the world, all the benefits listed above are exciting and provide motivation for investigation. However literature on the subject is largely concentrated on associated construction methods or ‘form-finding’ design methods. Further software related to and the methods of form finding either of ‘finding’ the general equilibrium, surface-active membrane shape Force Density Method (Schek, 1974), Dynamic relaxation ( Barnes, 1999) or ‘finding’ the pre-stressed fabric shape that can withstand forces during construction ADINA (Schimitz, 2004), EASY, FABRIC FORMER (Veenendaal, 2011), are highly specific to the task and/or proprietary to researchers, engineers and engineering practices. As such both the methods and software, are neither within easy access to architects nor easily incorporated within methods and software employed in production of architectural geometry. Further they are time-consuming and defy easy integration of architectural and spatial constraints external to the fabric-forming engineering problem that they are primarily concerned with.