Arno Pronk - Flexible Forming for Fluid Architecture

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

For Bilbao, the Guggenheim Museum is the international cultural icon. The success of this sculptural building for the reputation of Bilbao made that every city would like to have at least one archetypical iconic building. These types of buildings have no functional necessity, are always challenging, complex and expensive. They tend to be irregular, dynamic and geometrically complex and therefore the biggest problem is how to make them.

Buildings like the Bilbao Guggenheim are often described as digital, free-form or blob architecture. However, in free-form architecture technique and material have become the limiting factors. Because of these limitations, the word free is misleading. Therefore, I propose to use the word fluid: fluid architecture consists of unique buildings with curved surfaces. In fluid architecture one has to perceive fluidity: there is no absolute demand for a physical fluidity as long as the audience will perceive the building as fluid. The highlights of fluid architecture from the past 20 years clearly demonstrate that there is an area of tension between idea and technique; there is not only beauty of the designs, but also the tremendous complexity with regard to construction. The aim of this book is to support people dealing with fluid architecture with a better understanding of the main aspects of fluid architecture and to help them find a personal, suitable combination of architectural concepts and technical possibilities.

The building industry is accustomed to working with large tolerances compared to other industries. The combination of curved surfaces, unique products and large tolerances makes fluid architecture an interesting application for flexible moulding. These moulds can be used to create complex shapes. The cast materials will make a phase change from liquid to rigid. Therefore, the materials water/ice, polymer composite, concrete and glass were researched in combination with flexible moulding. This research resulted in a matrix with 25,000 theoretical possibilities for each material. 200 of these could be feasible. 49 case studies were researched and described. They are intended as a helpful instrument for both researchers and designers. It might help them to find the ultimate combination of perceived fluid architecture, material and flexible moulding techniques.

The case studies in this research resulted in several patents for moulding techniques, world records for the highest tower in ice and largest span in ice, a prototype of a laminated glass dome and several systems of composites and concrete with inflatables and mechanically pre-stressed membranes. This book is an important step in the design and realization of fluid architecture.