Looking at solidThinking Inspire 2014 for Architectural Design

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Innovative Morphological Form in Architecture

It is not possible for this author, in the time of testing software and writing a review, to truly work up some fascinating morphological architectural form using Inspire 2014. Therefore, we will be looking at a few things that solidThinking Inc. sent in for the article.

Bus Stop Structure

The following example is from a user in Europe and was sent to us by solidThinking. The structure is all concrete with reinforcing and it is so biomorphic that it seems almost alien. In our other photos of it below, you can see how beautiful the daylight drapes the rounded organic forms. (see image 07)

07 – A bus stop built of reinforced concrete and designed utilizing solidThinking Inspire 2014. (image courtesy Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. All rights reserved. The school used OptiStruct for the design.)

This real-life finished example is quite a bit different from our bus station roof example shown in the companion product review article (see, “Product Review: solidThinking Inspire 2014,” Architosh, 22 Jan 2015).

To get to a form like this in solidThinking Inspire the designer would establish a design space that approximates the shape of the roof plate and take that volume down the the ground level. (see image 08). Next, random or non-random points for the supports would be chosen. In the above real life bus stop, there are three points for support, visible in the second image below. (image 09). 

08 – The “design space” volume for the bus stop problem prior to optimization.

09 – Once a final optimized mass has been run in Inspire an engineer and architect could then take this as a point of departure for further design work.

If you are thinking, “wow, the final built form is so much lighter than the optimized mass model.” (image 09) you are not alone. Inspire doesn’t calculate with materials like concrete or wood. It utilizes mostly metals and plastics, the kinds of materials used in industrial designed products and parts.

If you think about it, one could input a concrete material into Inspire’s materials library; however, real concrete structures utilize steel reinforcing. Asking Inspire to know where it should add in steel to an optimized mass made up of a specific material—concrete in this case—is just asking the program to have artificial intelligence. That would be missing the point. Human design intelligence is what is required next after an optimized mass is created.

10 – the Inspire based final bus stop structure shown here. (image courtesy Aarhus School of Architecture, Denmark. All rights reserved.)

In the final resulted concrete bus stop, the designer relied on a structural engineer to interpret the optimized mass models generated in Inspire. With reinforced concrete a much visually lighter structure could be created in the final analysis, and it is quite beautiful as you can see in the image above. (see image 10)

Inspire Examples in Architecture

solidThinking Inspire lends itself quite well to generating unique forms and shapes. It is particularly interesting to use for works of civil or architectural engineering where long spans are carried and supports may lend themselves to truss configurations.

Notice in this video of a bridge structure how similar the support legs look to an animal’s (say dog) legs. There is something beautiful about the generated form and inspiration in terms of how to translate it into structure in steel, wood or concrete. 

In the example shown above a bridge-like structure was created and its design space had several deliberately shaped volumes cut out of it. The goal was to force a unique optimized mass that might lend itself to a trussed structure.

As you watch the video notice how at the ends of the structure, there is a very graceful bow that happens to the tall vertical supports coming up to hold the load block (where loading would be envisioned happening at a floor or street level). These support legs look remarkably biomorphic and at least on the right, remind this author of a hind leg on a dog or horse.

next page: Inspire for Architectural Detailing