La Volta Cascata | Fall 2017 | University of Pennsylvania | Thin Tile Vault Exercise
Critic: Franca Trubiano &
Jonathan Dessi-Olive
Jonathan Dessi-Olive
Collaborators: Alina Ahmad, Musab Badahdah, Joud Baothman, Mingxin He, Chae Young Kim, Joung-Hwa Kim, Yisha Li, Dongliang Li, Yang Li, Luciano Najem, Yunzhongda Peng, Mary Swysgood, Tianyi Sun, Shangzi Tu, Morgan Welch, Siqi Wang, Chwen-Ping Wang, Shuoqi Xiong, Yili Zha, Xieyang Zho
The goal of this seminar and workshop was to introduce students to the subject of masonry tectonics by investigating new design opportunities made possible with brick, block, tile and stone materials. The larger focus was to more closely bridge the gap between the current practice of architecture and craft, and for the craftsman, architect and engineer to engage more heavily with one another in the design process.
While reviewing the history and current ways of modeling masonry structures alongside, this course involved three workshops: the first being an introduction to the craft of masonry alongside journeymen and master masons, the second building an all compressive thin tile vault using Rhino-Vault / Kangaroo design modeling alongside with Guastavino inspired techniques of building, and the last dealt with building a high-performance brick cantilever working with fiber reinforced cement and post tensioned glass fiber reinforced polymer rods.
