| Due to the advancements in new building and material technologies, a great number of tensile structures have been developed to be incorporated with various types of architectural projects for the last three decades. Today, tensile structures are widely recognized as a potential design vocabulary in contemporary architecture. One major obstacle in the design process, however, is that tensile structures have no rigid form of their own; they have to be shaped to the desired form. The creation of such a form requires in depth knowledge and understanding of the stability and behavior of tensile structures. The form must be designed in such a way that all the tensile structural members are in equilibrium. The procedure to determine such equilibrium forms, which are adequate structurally as well as aesthetically, is referred to as form finding. Existing computational form finding methods can generate prestressed double-curved surface geometry, but architects are not well prepared to make the best use of these methods.; The goal of this research is to provide an architectural approach to form finding that assists architects in learning about the relationship between the form and the structural performance of the tensile structures, and to be able to explore new architectural forms that incorporate such ingenious and efficient structures. In order to achieve this goal, this dissertation identifies the processes for architects to initiate, and they are organized in such a way that architects will be able to carry out the form finding by themselves. This architectural approach consists of three components: (1) to review the interrelationship between tensile structural types and their characteristic forms, (2) to investigate the effect of the forms on structural performance and (3) to modify the equilibrium form to develop the desired stress distributions. These procedures have been thoroughly examined and proposed in this dissertation. This dissertation is concluded by remarking on the validity and/or limitations of the abovementioned approach to form finding, and discussing directions for future research. |
