prefabricated bamboo gridshell
sea shell
type: bamboo architecture
role: computational designer
collaboration: Bamboo Pure (Bali, Indonesia)
project location: Ivory Coast
year: 2023
The sea shell was developed through remote collaboration with Bamboo Pure in Bali, Indonesia. Managed by Camilla Mafra and supported by the Bamboo Pure structural team, the project involved designing a bamboo gridshell to envelop a 50-square-meter habitation, drawing insights from client references, technical schematics, and an assemblage manual. The overarching aim was to devise a shell that could be prefabricated in Bali and then shipped to the Ivory Coast.
The project was developed in Grasshopper with the aid of the Kangaroo plugin. A quad grid was designed on the XY plane and discretized by Weaverbird. Then, Kangaroo was used to optimize the shape through a particle-spring system. In this system, points act as “particles”, lines as “springs”, fixed points as “anchor points”, and gravity as a “load”. The corners of the grid serve as anchors, pulling towards the centre of the structure, which causes the shell to “pop up” and stand upright.
design of a shell and a platform
design process
Kangaroo output
Dendrocalamus Aspe
The structural arches were designed by intersecting planes with the Kangaroo mesh output.
Dendrocalamus Asper Stripe
The gridshell shape was created, transforming the quad mesh into diagonals.
SubDMesh – Rhino – MeshSubD
Lidi bundle (Bamboo Petung Blonde), gridshell support beam and overhang grid (Dendrocalamus Asper Stripe)
The overhang grid was created by splitting mesh 1 with mesh 2 and then diagonalizing it.
Pelupuh (bamboo shingles)
The roof was designed by converting the mesh into a SubD and manually deforming it in Rhino.
technical schematics
team
Parametric Modelling: Camila Calegari Marques
Architectural Coordinator: Camilla Mafra
Structural Recommendations: Bamboo Pure
Render: Camila Calegari Marques