Mud Shells Fabrication Technique
– Building up on knowledge gained from Phriends* for Shells Iaac seminar 2016 on robotic fabrication for mud shells.

www.iaacblog.com/life/maa-advanced-robotic-fabrication-seminar/
www.iaacblog.com/life/iaac-at-smartgeometry-workshop-2016-hybrid-domains/

Earthen Shells perforations & Natural ventilation performance
We will be exploring the Morphology of the openings and defining regions on the shells to analyse and fabricate those micro morphologies with deep influence on the wind flow.

• Cfd analysis to understand where it is better to have the openings, defining regions of the shell.
• vary they density and simulate its effect on the wind flow. We build a large series of small perforated shells of 20 cm side varying a parameter at the time.
• investigate the relationship between the shell’s main nerves and feet with the perforations type & density.
• fabricate by hand thickness shell variation in the perforations regions and analyse its effect on passive ventilation.

Earthen Shells inner and outer skin’s roughness
Enjoyable manual craft will be creatively put in place to find new forms of inner and outer membrane roughness and textures constantly recalibrated by cfd analysis.
The outer and inner skin texturing can be interactive.

We will be looking through the simulations at passive ventilation performance but as well wind flow surprises thanks to the unusual geometries and textures fabricated. We will be doing a very large quantity of small earthen shells varying their geometry + 3d texturing and proportion to their bounding box[2], their inner and outer skin textures, and their perforations.
[1] Earth mix: mix of clay, sand fibres, water and air
[2] All mud shells will be place in a glass or polycarbonate box. Simulations will be run on the mud shell in their bounding box. (real architectural project will be one or various mud shells inside a greenhouse type simple structure)