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Kamé

Conceiving a wooden sports hall roof structure.

The situation 

This course focused on structures, and especially wooden folded structures. Our objective was to conceive a sports hall roof to cover a 35 by 40 meters area and to integrate row of seats for 500 people. We had no specific site or constraints apart from those mentionned. The objective was to try out new possibilities for wooden structures, and to see its contemporary possible uses for new projects.

The proposal

We first worked on a square module folding in 6 parts. The development was mainly on its
precise shape in order to make it work when repeated along a curve to create an arch.
Through inversions of the modules and inversion of the strips composing the full roof we
obtained a shape that worked in the three dimensions and which had no points where the
static height would be null. Working with wood panels, we used grasshopper plugins developed at EPFL I-BOIS lab, finding solutions for wooden tenons and mortises joinery techniques applied to complex geometries.