image: John Brigham, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering
Credit: John Altdorfer/Swanson School of Engineering
Origami and kirigami have inspired a multidisciplinary team of engineers and architects to apply these ancient paper-folding art techniques to geometric principles and thereby create living buildings that respond to the sun, air, and ambient temperature. With the support of a $920,741 award from the National Science Foundation, the researchers will combine the creativity and experience of human designers with computational intelligence to increase the novelty and effectiveness of designs for environmentally responsive building technologies.
Principal investigator is John Brigham, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Co-investigators are Dale Clifford, professor of architecture at the California Polytechnic State University, and Evgueni Filipov, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan.
“Creating more efficient architecture which responds to its environment – whether at the highest LEED standard or living building standard – is critical to designing structures that are both sustainably efficient and healthy for the people who use them,” Brigham says. “Our goal is to combine human architectural and engineering design with machine learning and computational design optimization so that we create a new framework for origami-inspired adaptive structures.”
Brigham further explains that origami as an art was developed in the 17th century, but in the 20th century scientists and mathematicians began applying geometric and engineering principles to origami design.1 This understanding transformed the application of art to architecture.
A building’s design and materials are the greatest contributor to its energy efficiency and footprint, so designing a façade that responds to its environment by folding to capture air or create shade, for example, greatly improves its carbon footprint and provides a healthier work environment.
However, one challenge in creating adaptive buildings is the difficulty in creating a holistic, systematic design that behaves as a complex system, rather than one that applies to electricity use and another solely to temperature.
Adapting Paper to Architecture
At first glance, comparing folded paper animals to architecture may seem incredulous. Brigham counters that the geometry behind the paper-folding strengthens the overall structure.
“Even using a simple material like paper, origami shapes are self-supported; therefore, complex designs and materials aren’t as necessary when applied to responsive architecture. There are already-built examples such as the Bilbao Health Department in Spain (left) and the Bengt Sjostrom Starlight Theatre in Rockford, Illinois (above).
“The difference today is that artificial intelligence and machine learning help to integrate origami design with engineering and architecture and, most importantly, with human creativity,” Brigham says.
According to their proposal, the project will “simultaneously create a new educational track for architecture and engineering students to learn about and test their ideas for adaptive building concepts.” By providing this test bed and dataset, the researchers will create these new origami-based design processes, coupled with new instructional methods for future students.
The integrated computational-experimental research effort includes three thrusts:
1) Establish a coupled human-computer design strategy for component-level origami-inspired adaptive structures to simultaneously meet multiple external environmental interaction goals and intrinsic structural requirements;
2) Create a computational framework to evaluate the performance of origami-inspired adaptive structures, and augment their design based on human input and computer guidance; and
3) Establish a framework for the introduction of new structural concepts in an architectural design process and application of this framework to identify emergent origami-inspired concepts for adaptive structures.
“We are very excited that these new computational tools can augment human creativity and generate a wealth of knowledge that informs each generation of innovation, such that we create a self-learning design environment,” Brigham says. “This new framework will further expand innovation at an exponential rate to benefit structures from the smallest home to the largest office tower.”
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1 M. Meloni, J. Cai, Q. Zhang, D. Sang-HoonLee, M. Li, R. Ma, T. E. Parashkevov, J. Feng, Engineering Origami: A Comprehensive Review of Recent Applications, Design Methods, and Tools. Adv. Sci. 2021, 8, 2000636. https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202000636