Red Sea Hotel 12: Arrival Hub
image © Red Sea Development Company
Design of a timber lattice gridshell
Design
Architect
Foster + Partner
My Role
Computational Designer @ AKT II
For this project I was responsible for the computational design, setting up a computational process for the form finding along with automated generation of both structural analysis and bim models.
AKT II Team
Dragos Naicu, Giulio Gianni
Year
2020
Status
In construction. Expected to be finished in 2023
External Links
The design for the hotel features a series of timber structures of various sizes and typologies, and the general plan
can be seen in the Dezeen article linked above. My involvement was on the design of the arrival hub, which was comprised of a clustering
of timber gridshells. A set of these were designed as lattice shells with only a rope facade to provide shade, and we carried out the geometry
and form finding needed to be able to build these from bent timber lattices.
The process relied heavily on the in-house interoperability toolkit (Reakt), developed by myself at AKT II, as the design needed to take complex geometric
constraints in terms of curvature and forming stresses into consideration, both in the form finding process and in the subsequent member designs. All of this was presented at the
Grasshopper UGM in February 2021, were myself and my collegue presented the process in detail.
Below are some snippets of the process.
ISO of the lattice shell
Elevation of the lattice shell
Analysis of curvature conditions. Pink shows geodesic (in-plane) and blue shows normal (out-of-plane) curvature
Relaxation of an initial projected grid into a geodesic grid. Gif shows how the geodesic curvature is dissappearing
Sensitivity analysis finding a base surface which eliminates as much of the forming stress as possible.