Multi-Storey Wood Building System: Building Stock Extension

CO-DESIGN, ADAPTATION, INTEGRATION AND OPTIMISATION OF MULTI-STOREY WOOD BUILDING SYSTEMS FOR BUILDING STOCK EXTENSION

Achieving the sustainable development goals defined by the United Nations requires innovation and commitment from all industries. For the building sector, this means adopting more cost- and energy-efficient methods, reducing material waste and increasing the use of CO₂-neutral materials such as timber. This can be achieved through the development of Co-Design methods that integrate architectural, structural and building physics criteria in feedback with novel fabrication and construction capabilities in order to articulate timber building systems that overcome the typical limitations of multi-storey timber structures. Such quasi mono-material and future-proof wood building systems are based on standard timber materials (e.g. GLT or CLT) and offer open-purpose, multifunctional and geometrically bespoke column, wall and ceiling elements, thus achieving biaxial, variable-span and structurally optimised, resource-efficient solutions using on-site/off-site additive and subtractive manufacturing processes. This would enable independence from the typically constraining rigid grid ordering systems and foster new timber architectural typologies that are also attractive for long-term use by being adaptable and flexibly programmable.

Based on the findings of the predecessor Research Project RP 3-1, this project will address the next set of research challenges for the Co-Design methods and multi-storey timber building system developments by:

• Expanding the design space of the system towards the extension of the existing building stock by investigating and integrating design adaptation methods and flexible strategies for establishing performative interfaces with existing structures.
• Investigating the potential for replacing remaining non-timber building system elements with wood-based solutions, thereby facilitating the integration of additional building elements into the existing building system, such as lateral bracing. This will include the investigation of bonded joints for energy dissipation capabilities and fire/high temperature resistance.
• We will also extend the interdisciplinary modelling methods to other relevant parameters (e.g. fire resistance) and investigate multi-parameter optimisation methods and design frameworks beyond those developed in RP 3-1.
• Finally, the research will establish a coordinated interdisciplinary project development process and a coherent computational design and engineering model through continuous synthesis. The resulting novel building system and methods will be demonstrated and evaluated through the building elements in the IntCDC demonstrator building. In parallel, we will evaluate the building stock extension method through benchmark and synthesis studies.
  
  

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATORS

Prof. Achim Menges
Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD), University of Stuttgart
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Jan Knippers
Institute for Building Structures and Structural Design (ITKE), University of Stuttgart
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Philip Leistner
Institute for Acoustics and Building Physics (IABP), University of Stuttgart
Prof. Dr.-Ing. Harald Garrecht with Dr. Simon Aicher
Materials Testing Institute (MPA), University of Stuttgart

RESEARCHERS

Theresa Müller (IABP)
Luis Orozco (ICD)
Nils Opgenorth (ICD)
Cristóbal Tapia Camú (MPA)
Hans Jakob Wagner (ICD)
Lorenz Riedel (ITKE)
Simon Treml (ICD)