This paper aims to introduce a fabrication-driven design strategy called “nesting” and to highlight its key characteristics and potential for a more sustainable future. Nesting is an innovative approach to ecological freeform shell construction, in which the shell is subdivided into nested, stackable components—resembling a set of Russian dolls—where each piece is fabricated and assembled sequentially using additive or subtractive methods. By integrating construction-aware geometric principles, it enables designers to optimize material use and fabrication time, supporting near zero-waste production. This strategy was explored through two six-credit Advanced Design Studios within the NAAB-accredited architecture program at the California College of the Arts (CCA). Studio projects included the workflow, design, and fabrication of cityTREE, a nested tower-like green biome designed to purify air. Additionally, Cocoon, a 2.9-meter-tall 3D-printed nested sculptural column, was developed to investigate the pedagogical applications of nesting in architectural education. Cocoon was subsequently fabricated at the Autodesk Technology Center in San Francisco to explore alternative approaches to freeform shell construction in practice. In this paper, after outlining the definition, logic, and characteristics of nesting strategies, the authors discuss the benefits of nesting in the education of future architects and builders, explaining its pedagogical significance.
Project based learning (PBL) has become an important approach in engineering education for promoting authentic engagement with design, construction, and professional practice. Increasingly, such approaches are also expected to support sustainability related competencies through resource awareness and context responsive learning. This paper presents the Design, Assemble and Dismantle (DAD) Project as a specialised implementation of PBL developed to support experiential construction education across diverse educational contexts. Findings indicate that DAD remains pedagogically coherent across varied institutional structures, accreditation requirements, and cohort characteristics. Through full scale assembly and dismantling activities, students develop teamwork, communication, constructability awareness, critical thinking, and the ability to translate design decisions into practical implementation. Sustainability within the project is considered primarily through environmental and educational perspectives. Environmental sustainability is represented through efficient use of structural members, reuse enabled through dismantling, and awareness of construction efficiency and waste reduction, while educational sustainability is reflected in the transferability of pedagogical practice across institutions. The findings suggest that DAD provides a scalable and adaptable framework for experiential engineering education that supports international collaboration and contributes to the development of more sustainability-oriented construction curricula.
The integration of sustainability into architectural education has become a central concern in response to global environmental challenges and evolving professional standards. Accreditation systems play a significant role in shaping how sustainability is conceptualized and implemented within architectural curricula. This study investigates how sustainability is framed within two international accreditation frameworks, National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) Accreditation (2020/2025) and NAAB International Certification (ICert, 2019), and examines how these conceptual frameworks are reflected in architectural education in Türkiye. Using an AI-supported comparative content analysis, the study categorizes sustainability-related concepts in accreditation documents into three analytical clusters: normative (value-oriented), performative (technical and measurable), and hybrid (integration-oriented). The conceptual distribution identified in these frameworks is then compared with institutional documents and curriculum structures from two ICert-certified architecture programs in Türkiye. The findings reveal that while sustainability appears in curricula as both normative discourse and technical knowledge, its integration into design processes remains limited. In particular, environmental performance data and technical competencies are often confined to specialized courses and rarely translated into design synthesis within studio education. The study further examines the building envelope as a proposed case to illustrate how sustainability knowledge can shift from isolated technical expertise to integrated decision-making. By combining accreditation analysis with AI-supported curriculum mapping, the study proposes a methodological framework for evaluating the integration of sustainability in architectural education and highlights structural gaps between sustainability discourse and its performative implementation in design pedagogy.
Industrial buildings are essential to the green transition by providing production and storage facilities required in the expansion of renewable energy. However, these buildings are often related to high embodied emissions, short lifespans, and limited reusability, while receiving little attention in sustainability policies, research, teaching, and practice. This study investigates how a tri-directional learning model integrating research, practice knowledge, and teaching can support sustainability knowledge creation for factory and warehouse (FW) buildings. The study combines focus group interviews with architectural practitioners and a constraint-based design seminar with master-level students. The findings indicate that practice-based insights can inform teaching, where students develop alternative design strategies that contribute to subsequent research questions and hypotheses. Within the scope of this study, the tri-directional process concludes at knowledge synthesis and hypothesis generation, while experimental testing and dissemination back to practice remain future steps. The model nevertheless supports knowledge production under real-world constraints and the development of sustainability strategies for FW building design emphasizing adaptability and lifespan extension.
We present a research-led teaching framework for DSASB (Deployable Structures with Articulated Straight Bars) that integrates parametric design, prototyping, and in-situ testing to support sustainability-oriented architectural education. Building on SMiA (Structural Morphology in Architecture) research on scissor-like systems, the framework is delivered through studio, workshop, and field formats across bachelor and master cohorts (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Abdullah Gül University, Nottingham Trent University, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya), with doctoral research feeding directly into full-scale outcomes. Students address real constraints—motion control, joint detailing, tolerances, and assembly logistics—while developing accurate digital kinematics, efficient materialization, and safe 1:1 (full-scale) deployment. The approach links sustainability to measurable performance: minimized transport volume, rapid deployment, reconfiguration, and reuse. Teaching follows an iterative cycle from scale models to computational kinematics (Rhino + Grasshopper), deployed-state checks, and full-scale validation. Qualification uses metrics (deployment time, joint reliability, stiffness under membrane pretension, and material efficiency), demonstrated through two capstone case studies: the self-supporting Tetrapod Pavilion (∽30 m 2 ) and the Vertex Pavilion (three deployable arches stabilized by membrane tension).
One of the challenges facing contemporary architectural education is implementing teaching approaches that can enhance students’ design skills and technical proficiency in a context that addresses the climate emergency. This paper presents a design translation approach that aims to strengthen the synergies between design and construction technology while introducing sustainable building materials, such as mass timber, into the curriculum. In this approach, students select a house designed by a renowned architect and reinterpret it through the lens of a new mass timber construction system. The paper analyses a design studio case study in which the approach was applied over two consecutive iterations, assessing the process, student work and official course evaluations. The findings suggest that this approach fosters a more nuanced understanding of conceptual design intent, social context, and sustainable construction technology with mass timber. Nevertheless, the study highlights the importance of targeted input from experts in deepening technical rigor, and suggests that interdisciplinary collaboration between architecture and civil engineering students could lead to further improvement. The approach can also be adapted to other design contexts, offering an open framework for integrating sustainable materials into a more holistic design education.
The XenaForm is a lightweight timber folded-plate structural system developed through research-led teaching that integrates geometric stability, material efficiency, and hands-on construction. The system originates from a geometric condition of spatial stability based on non-coplanar triangular assemblies and is extended through a rule-based algorithm that governs both form generation and erection sequence. Implemented within undergraduate architectural engineering education, the XenaForm enables students to design, analyze, fabricate, and assemble spatial structures whose stability is guaranteed by geometric compatibility rather than post-hoc structural analysis. A full-scale prototype constructed in Vilnius demonstrates the feasibility of the system as a pedagogical, architectural, and structural typology. The project emphasizes plywood construction and manual assembly, framing structural design as both a technical and social act. The XenaForm illustrates how geometric rigor and disciplined rule sets can foster creative exploration while maintaining constructability, efficiency, and structural clarity. This paper also discusses Python-based generation and AI-assisted visualization as emerging tools for expanding, testing, and critiquing the XenaForm design space.
Academic institutions have a responsibility to support the building construction sector in reducing its excessive carbon emissions and consumption of resources. This can be achieved by placing greater emphasis on circular construction and the use of renewable and underused resources in research and teaching. This paper presents a learning design that addresses this challenge. Based on active and experiential learning, the design was implemented as part of an elective MSc course at Aarhus University’s Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering in the spring semester of 2025. This course focused on digital design and fabrication tools, which have great potential to facilitate circular construction and increase the use of renewable resources. Moreover, digitally driven automation could help to solve problems associated with an ageing European population, particularly the potential shortage of skilled labor in the near future. The learning design likewise aims to actively engage students in research. It involves three interconnected in-class assignments that introduce students to humanâ–“robot collaboration processes that facilitate the fabrication of optimized timber slabs. The paper provides detailed information on these assignments and their outcomes and presents the results of a System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire based on the third and final assignment. Finally, the article reflects on the insights gained and how the learning design could be improved in the future.
The materialization of architectural form hinges on the proper adoption of a structural system serving as its carrier, necessitating profound integration of artistic and engineering thought processes in design. Historically unified within the architect’s profession, these domains have been separated for over two centuries, rendering reintegration unlikely. Consequently, cultivating structural intuition in architects is essential to embed feasibility considerations deeply into form-generation. Contemporary non-linear pedagogical models, emphasizing interdisciplinarity and “learning by doing”, facilitate this through simulated full-cycle object creation—from inception and conceptual development to detailed design and realization. Direct material engagement in pre- and post-implementation phases fosters evaluation of design decisions’ environmental impacts and promotes circular material flow thinking. This paper presents the authors’ experiences implementing such an educational model.
This paper details the pedagogical structure and research outputs of a Fabrication & Structure studio, a design studio for second- and third-year TU Dublin Bachelor of Architecture students. The studio brief argues that material utilisation directly impacts construction sustainability; it prioritises material characteristics rather than site as primary design drivers. The curriculum is research-led and intrinsically linked to HYBRID Lab’s Circular Modularity project, which addresses construction waste and material reuse in Ireland’s Architecture, Construction, and Engineering (ACE) sector. The paper is structured around two central research questions: To what degree does the studio reflect best practices in Design Research? How can student projects contribute to ongoing research on material reuse in the Irish ACE sector? Here, learning focuses on navigating shared responsibility and creating generalisable strategies that contribute to research on the future of construction. An emphasis on shared responsibility and sustainability (construction during climate crises) forms the studio’s ethical backbone and aligns with contemporary research in engineering ethics education. Teaching methods include physical prototyping, manual and digital fabrication, and weekly consultations with structural engineers to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration. A central pedagogical feature is ‘spread authorship’ (unusual in architectural pedagogy), supported by design exchanges that foster rational, evidence-based discussion. The technical research generated by student teams has produced diverse timber reuse strategies for material offcuts, resulting in innovative structural systems. Ultimately, this framework provides a generalisable model for transferring research-informed sustainability education into practice, bridging academic inquiry and the physical realities of circular construction.
The building sector’s transition toward sustainability requires a shift from material-intensive design to geometry-driven structural intelligence. However, traditional architectural education often fails to bridge the gap between abstract structural theory and material economy. This paper evaluates “Les Petits Constructeurs,” an innovative pedagogical program at ENSA Paris-La Villette where Master’s students teach complex structural concepts—such as funicular logic, inertia, and shell behavior—to children aged 6-10. Grounded in the “learning by explaining” model and inspired by Faraday’s Christmas Lectures, the program posits that the necessity of simplifying complex phenomena for a novice audience fosters a deeper conceptual appropriation for the student. To test this hypothesis, a comparative study was conducted, contrasting the progress of participating students with a control group following a traditional project-based curriculum. Initial results (2024-2025) demonstrate that participants achieved an average improvement score 22.5 points higher (on a 100-point scale) than the control group. These findings suggest that technical mediation and pedagogical transposition are effective tools for anchoring sustainable design reflexes, offering a transferable model for integrating collective intelligence and material economy into architectural education.
Tensegrity – a self-stabilized structural principle based on discrete compression elements and a continuous tensile network – remains a conceptually rich yet underexplored system in architecture. Despite its relevance to lightweight, materially efficient design, it is rarely integrated into architectural education as a spatial or tectonic paradigm. This study uses tensegrity as a pedagogical framework for examining learning processes in structural design education, linking it to material intelligence, sustainability, and educational innovation. Conducted with twenty third-semester bachelor students, the course followed a three-phase approach: (1) physical model experimentation, (2) computational exploration using a customized plugin for tensegrity generation, form-finding, and structural analysis, and (3) a design studio focused on a forest kindergarten. Through the lens of structural logic, responsible design choices, and critical reflection on the appropriateness of tensegrity in architecture, students adopted either “Tensegrities as Architecture“ or “Architectural Tensegrity“ as a conceptual position. Results indicate that physical prototyping was most effective for understanding prestress, equilibrium, and spatial interdependence, while computational tools expanded design possibilities complementing hands-on work. Projects treating tensegrity as a generative structural logic produced more coherent outcomes. Overall, tensegrity’s primary pedagogical value lies in fostering relational reasoning, material intelligence, and systemic design thinking within an integrated research-laboratory-design studio framework.
Circularity in architecture has emerged in response to the environmental consequences of contemporary construction. Dominant building materials systems, particularly cement-based systems, contribute significantly to global CO 2 emissions while producing rigid structures that resist transformation. When conditions change, demolition often becomes the only viable option, resulting in the loss of embodied energy and the generation of waste. Architectural research increasingly investigates assemblies of discrete elements that enable adaptability, disassembly, and reuse. The paper examines the geometric logic of traditional stone masonry as the basis for a pedagogical approach for circular construction. Implemented within an M.Arch study unit, the framework reconceptualises masonry as a system governed by generative relationships between single-unit and assembly geometry. Students formulate design procedures as algorithms, explore variations, and test fabrication strategies through iterative prototyping to investigate potential construction methods and architectural applications. Three student investigations demonstrate how geometric rules mediate between material and structural behaviour, fabrication strategies, and circular construction principles. The study shows that circular potential can be embedded in the geometric organisation of discrete assemblies and argues that a geometric reinterpretation of stone masonry offers a transferable approach for integrating innovative computational design and fabrication within architectural education.
The present study discusses elasto-plastic buckling of spatial arches which are composed of members of H sections. The buckling analysis considers the flexural torsional deformation of open sections. The members are H-600x200x9x16, and they are subjected to lateral torsional deformation. Two types of supports are studied, pin-support and frame-support. The load conditions are two cases. One is uniform loading, and the other is non-uniform loading. First, elasto-plastic buckling loads under uniform or non-uniform loading, respectively, are calculated. For this calculation, a FEM beam element recently developed for open sections is applied, followed by a proposal for an evaluation method of buckling loads based on a normalized slenderness ratio. The normalized slenderness ratio is defined in terms of linear buckling load and plastic load, both of which being calculated using the axial force and bending moment of members. The validity is investigated through comparing the elasto-plastic buckling loads with the evaluated capacities, followed by confirmation of the preciseness and applicability of the evaluation method.
Location of Project: Hempstead, NY, USA Structural Type: gridshell Project Scale: two shells each approximately 1.98 m by 0.91 m in plan Structural Engineer: Esther Zhang and Edward M. Segal Construction year: 2022
The latticed shells with prestressed cables are typical hybrid structural systems with good mechanical performance and favorable economic benefits. A multi-objective optimization framework based on response surface methodology and the NSGA-II algorithm is proposed to improve the static, stability, and economic performance of single-layer latticed shells with prestressed cables simultaneously. The effectiveness of the optimal solution is verified by comparing its characteristic responses with the alternative solutions in the Pareto solution set. The efficiencies of the optimized shells with different cable layouts are compared, and the influence of joint stiffness is thoroughly discussed to guide practical design. The results indicate that the established response surface models have high accuracies for the nonlinear response optimization problem. The optimal solution has the best comprehensive performance in all the candidate solutions. For prestressed shells with different cable layouts, the optimized shell with only out-of-plane cables has the best economic performance, whereas the one with only in-plane cables has the best static performance. For latticed shells with different joint assumptions, the nonlinear buckling load and steel consumption are much greater in the optimized shells with semi-rigid joints due to the increased member section and length of the struts.
Recently, the necessity to design and build structures in a less material-intensive way has brought attention to the material waste produced during their construction. While traditional thin-tile vaults demonstrate inherently efficient and falseworkless construction, free-form vault geometries often rely on disposable carton falsework, or CNC-cut plywood, contributing to construction waste. This paper investigates an alternative paradigm for free-form thin-tile vault construction, demonstrating that geometry-informed forms can eliminate construction waste while significantly reducing reliance on complex robotic systems. Through material, curvature, and tiling pattern studies, the research identifies critical constraints when a single robotic arm assembles a free-form, thin-tile vault without formwork, falsework, or auxiliary robotic support. The scaled prototype serves as a proof of concept and a framework for evaluating constructability, failure modes, and challenges. The findings suggest a pathway towards more sustainable free-form masonry workflows that balance material efficiency, construction intelligence, and technological advancements.
Location of Project: Copenhagen, DenmarkStructural Type:spatial module formed by actively bent elementsProject Scale:domestic model: December 2024 / campus model: January 2025Architect:Jaime E. EspinosaConstruction year:2024-2025“Each material has a different specific personality, and each form imposes a different tensional phenomenon.The natural solution of a problem – art without artifice -, optimal in fornt of the set of previous taxes that originated it, impresses with its message, satisfying, at the same time, the demands of the technician and the artist.The birth of a structural whole, the result of a creative process, a fusion of technique with art, of ingenuity with study, of imagination with sensitivity, escapes from the pure domain of logic to enter the secret frontiers of inspiration.Before and above all calculation there is the idea, moulding the material into a resistant form, to fulfill its mission.This book is dedicated to that idea.”Eduardo Torroja
This paper presents examples of geometric classifications of free-form surfaces in the imaginary parameter technique. The DFT-based technique can create free-form shells that strictly pass through all the specified control points. Expressive and diverse morphogenesis can be achieved by giving complex values to height coordinates as the control points. It is explained visually and mathematically that the imaginary parts of the complex values play a significant role in determining shape and slope of generated surfaces. It is shown from numerical examples that the geometric shapes of the surfaces are determined by only three parameters of the aforementioned imaginary parts, and geometric classifications of the surfaces are demonstrated as well as mechanical evaluations.
Bending-active inflated shells represent a novel class of lightweight deployable structures, typically composed of modular inflatable cushions combined with auxiliary cables and cross-bracing. Their global behavior relies on a self-erecting mechanism in which active bending, induced by cable tensioning, provides stability and load-carrying capacity. This structural system has been explored theoretically through analogies with the classical elastica problem, offering valuable insights into its geometric and mechanical characteristics. Subsequent extensions of semi-analytical formulations allowed the inclusion of external point loading conditions, although initial models were restricted to shapes without inflection points. Recent methodological advances have overcome these limitations, enabling the description of a broader class of deformed configurations and thus widening the potential applicability ofsemi-analytical models for such systems. This paperpresents a review ofsemi-analytical approaches to modeling the global behavior ofbending-active inflated shell structures. Selected contributions from the literature are mentioned to contextualize existing approaches, highlighting their assumptions and reported limitations. Particular emphasis is placed on the potential of semi-analytical frameworks to provide physically interpretable results that complement numerical simulations and experimental studies. Finally, research gaps and future directions are outlined, including the need for formulations capable of capturing material nonlinearities, interaction effects, and scale-dependent phenomena.
