Construction has always been a fascinating and challenging aspect of timber gridshells. So far, only three techniques have successfully been used for the erection of such structures: the so-called ‘lift-up’, ‘push-up’ and ‘ease-down’ (Quinn et al. 2015). Inflatable Membrane Technology is here proposed as a new solution and is tested by means of numerical simulations on a simple case study. As a matter of fact, IMT reduces the timber lath’s stress during erection and guarantees an optimal shape control. It also seems suitable to post-form more challenging gridshell geometries, but this aspect still deserves further investigations and experiments.

In book: La bellezza per il rospo (Beauty according to the toad) (pp.221-222), Publisher: CLEAN Edizioni, Editors: Roberta Amirante, Carmine Piscopo, Paola Scala.

Born in the world of mathematics to define all those “equations that express a set of quantities as explicit functions of a number of independent variables, known as ‘parameters’." Its architectural transposition, which was introduced by Luigi Moretti during the Forties, indicates a consistent system of elements and relationships among them, that is founded on the construction of topological rather than metrical spaces. In other words, it identifies the only invariant of each and every design process with the potential of standardization in digital design and allows software developers to release specific programs which are able to support conceptual design in architecture.