Buga Fibre Pavilion by ICD/ITKE University of
Stuttgart in Bundesgartenschau, Heillbronn, 2019

Embedded in
the wavelike landscape of the Bundesgartenschau grounds, the BUGA Fibre
Pavilion offers visitors an astounding architectural experience and a glimpse
of future construction. It builds on many years of biomimetic research in
architecture at the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD)
and the Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE) at the
University of Stuttgart.



The pavilion
demonstrates how combining cutting-edge computational technologies with
constructional principles found in nature enables the development of truly
novel and genuinely digital building systems. The pavilion’s load-bearing
structure is robotically produced from advanced fibre composites only. This
globally unique structure is not only highly effective and exceptionally
lightweight, but it also provides a distinctive yet authentic architectural
expression and an extraordinary spatial experience.


Novel Composite Building System Inspired by Nature
In biology
most load-bearing structures are fibre composites. They are made from fibres,
as for example cellulose, chitin or collagen, and a matrix material that
supports them and maintains their relative position. The astounding performance
and unrivalled resource efficiency of biological structures stem from these
fibrous systems. Their organization, directionality and density is finely tuned
and locally varied in order to ensure that material is only placed where it is
needed.



The BUGA
Fibre Pavilion aims to transfer this biological principle of load-adapted and
thus highly differentiated fibre composite systems into architecture. Manmade
composites, such as the glass- or carbon-fibre-reinforced plastics that were
used for this building, are ideally suited for such an approach because they
share their fundamental characteristics with natural composites.



The project
builds on many years of biomimetic research at the Institute for Computational
Design and Construction (ICD) and the Institute for Building Structures and
Structural Design (ITKE). It shows how an interdisciplinary exploration of
biological principles together with the latest computational technologies can
lead to a truly novel and genuinely digital fibre composite building system.
Only a few years ago, this pavilion would have been impossible to design or
build.





Integrative Computational Design and Robotic Fabrication
The pavilion
is made from more than 150.000 meters of spatially arranged glass- and carbon
fibres. They all need to be individually designed and placed, which is very
hard to achieve with a typical linear workflow and established production
technologies. Thus, it requires a novel co-design approach, where architectural
design, structural engineering and robotic fabrication are developed in
continuous computational feedback. In this way, the fibre arrangement, density
and orientation of each building component can be individually calibrated,
structurally tuned and architecturally articulated, while remaining directly
producible.



The building
components are produced by robotic, coreless filament winding, a novel additive
manufacturing approach pioneered and developed at the University of Stuttgart.
Fibrous filaments are freely placed between two rotating winding scaffolds by a
robot. During this process, the predefined shape of the building component
emerges only from the interaction of the filaments, eliminating the need for
any mould or core. This allows for bespoke form and individual fibre layup for
each component without any economic disadvantage. In addition, there is no production
waste or material off-cuts. During manufacturing, a lattice of translucent
glass fibres is generated, onto which the black carbon fibres are placed where
they are structurally needed. This results in highly load-adapted components
with a highly distinct architectural appearance.


Full
production took place at the project’s industrial partner FibR GmbH. Each
component takes between four to six hours to make from around 1.000 meters of
glass fibre and 1.600 meters of carbon fibre on average.

Unique Lightweight Structure and Expressive Architectural Space
The pavilion
covers a floor area of around 400 square meters and achieves a free span of
more than 23 meters. It is enclosed by a fully transparent, mechanically
pre-stressed ETFE membrane. The primary load bearing structure is made from 60
bespoke fibre composite components only. With 7.6 kilograms per square meter,
it is exceptionally lightweight, approximately five times lighter than a more
conventional steel structure. Elaborate testing procedures required for full
approval showed that a single fibrous component can take up to 250 kilonewtons
of compression force, which equals around 25 tons or the weight of more than 15
cars. The pavilion shows how a truly integrative approach to computational
design and robotic fabrication enables the development of novel, truly digital
fibre composite building systems that are fully compliant with the stringent
German building regulations, exceptionally light, structurally efficient and
architecturally expressive.




Embedded in
the wavelike landscape of the Bundesgartenschau grounds, the pavilion
translates the innovation on a technical level into a unique architectural
experience. The black carbon filament bundles, wrapping around the translucent
glass fibre lattice-like flexed muscles, create a stark contrast in texture
that is highlighted by the pavilion’s fully transparent skin. This distinctive
architectural articulation is further intensified by the gradient from sparser
carbon filaments at the top towards their denser application on the slenderest
components that meet the ground. While most visitors may not have seen anything
like it before, the pavilion exposes its underlying design principles in an
explicable yet expressive way. Its unfamiliar yet authentic architectural
articulation evokes new ways of digital making, which no longer remain a
futuristic proposition but already have become a tangible reality.



Architects :
ICD/ITKE
University of Stuttgart
Location : Bundesgartenschau Heilbronn GmbH
2019, Theodor-Fischer-Straße 36, 74076 Heilbronn, Germany
Area : 400.0 m2
Project Year
: 2019
Photographs
: Roland
Halbe, ICD/ITKE, University of Stuttgart, Nikolai Benner
Via > ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart
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