Adaptive everything

Basrah Main Stadium Construction Timeline Basrah Main Stadium under construction. Photo courtesy of Josef Hadi / Skyscraper City In the summer of 2010, we assisted 360 Architecture in designing the GFRP facade panels and connection brackets of the new 65,000 seat soccer stadium in Basrah . The fabrication process had to be reduced by 18 months in order to host the first match in 2013. Given that the panels measure about 100 feet, it takes about 4 months to create one mold. Hence, the number of molds required for GFRP panels had to be reduced from 10 to 5. We worked very closely with the 360 Architecture and with Bahrain based fabricator BFG to accomplish this goal. Here’s a look at the project timeline in photos. April 2010: We start developing panel geometry in Digital Project and use Excel to evaluate the design. Only one panel assembly was modeled, and then instantiated using the PowerCopy feature in Digital Project. July 2010: Brackets were designed in Digital P...

We <3 the Geometry Gym Plugins for Grasshopper Grasshopper-designed roof of the Al Menna Sports Complex in Iraq. The smart structural interpreter (ssi) tools for Grasshopper changed the way that we engineers look at modeling. We first tested the ssi plugin in 2010, when we were searching for the fastest possible way to design a stadium roof structure with SAP. Our challenge was to submit a detailed set of drawings for a competition proposal for the fabric roof system of the Al Menaa Sports Complex in Iraq. We spent three days at the offices of 360 Architects , sitting together to generate a parametric model of the roof that would allow us to study different design scenarios, both from an architectural and structural perspective. On day four, we used the ssiSAP interpreter to assign structural material properties to our wireframe geometry, and then to ‘bake’ this into SAP to run analyses. The analysis in SAP is set up relatively quickly for a project such as this – the bulk o...