Membrane Mechanics

In the U.S., the construction industry faces a crisis. Declining labor productivity, depleted natural resources, and wasteful disposal practices have all contributed to a built environment that is outdated, inefficient, and feeble. Like so many other others around the country, the A/E/C industry’s old M.O. is no longer viable.

Sigrid Adriaenssens, an associate professor at Princeton University, proposed a new way of construction at her recent lecture, “Harnessing Extraordinary Mechanics for Structural Design”, held at MIT. Her work interrogates what we design for, how we design, and how we build. These fundamental questions allow her to reformulate structural methods in construction; her focus is on slender surfaces with extreme loading that are designed using geometry and mechanics through a self-assembly process. Her framework pilots new materials, minimal material usage and energy requirements, and efficient methods of construction.

“We are really going to need [these interventions] because we are facing huge challenges; we need more floor space, we have much bigger loadings, and we don’t want to create any waste when we are building,” says Adriaenssens. Simply put: “We need to change.”

Adriaenssens draws inspiration from myriad trades and areas of study. She has worked closely with craftsmen, lace makers, artistic dancers, and botanists. “We look to biology, craft, and history to inspire new structural systems that maybe haven’t been studied before. In order to do that, we developed numerical, machine learning, graphical, and fluid structure interaction models to generate knowledge in this domain,” explains Adriaenssens. Her work—lightweight, “membrane” structures with many load paths—awakens an underlying poetry in the way structures perform and activate their environment.

These new methods and practices present possibilities for a constructed environment tuned not only for its current function, but the impact during construction, after construction, and into the distant future. In an industry that relies on typological traditions and construction methods that compromise their ability to continue into the not-so-distant future, Adriaenssens navigates towards flexibility, resiliency, and strength.