IGS: Paneling the Eiffel Tower Pavilions

Recent architectural freeform projects involving transparent envelopes, like the Foundation Louis Vuitton in Paris, make use of hot-bent tempered cylindrical glass panels at a large scale. The realization of the occurring surfaces, consisting of thousands of panels, pose new challenges to all stages from design to detailing to production. Especially the related geometric problem of generating a paneling, optimized for production requirements and visual appearance, cannot be solved by any commercially available software today. In several case studies for the Pavilions that will be built on the first platform of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, we demonstrate the effectiveness of a novel computational framework, which uses globally coupled geometric optimization. This framework allows us to minimize the risk introduced by cold bending of flat or previously hot-bent tempered glass, as well as the production cost of those glass panels, while maximizing the smooth appearance of the resulting panelized surfaces. The presented computational technology enables the cost-effective realization of high-quality transparent envelopes.


BibTeX Entry:

@ article{eiffel-paneling-igs-2011,
      author = "Michael Eigensatz and Alexander Schiftner",
      title = "Paneling the Eiffel Tower Pavilions",
      journal = "Intelligent Glass Solutions: Complex geometries
                 and freeform building envelopes",
      year = 2011,
      volume = 4,
      pages = "41 -- 48"
}

IGS: Paneling the Eiffel Tower Pavilions

Online version of article:
Paneling the Eiffel Tower Pavilions

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