Large scale double curved glass facades made feasible -
The Arena Corinthians West Facade

Freeform structures are a striking trend in contemporary architecture. The realization of such structures becomes particularly challenging and costly when it comes to glass façades. We present an approach that significantly lowers cost for such projects while maintaining their surface quality. We illustrate this approach at hand of a large scale project, the west glass façade of a new stadium in Sao Paulo. This 5400m2 façade was designed by the architect Anibal Coutinho using a truly double curved surface, featuring curvature radii as low as 2.5m. Splitting the surface using a projected regular grid, which minimises cut off, resulted in 855 mostly double curved panels. Using our approach we were able to rationalise the design using 84% cylindrical, 10% flat, and only 6% double curved panels, while maintaining the tight quality constraints required by the architect and the impression of a double curved surface. This means 94% of the panels can be produced using an automated industrial process. The key ingredient to our approach is a global optimization method, which allows to trade off between surface quality and cost, supports numerous surface types, as well as reuse of molds. For the presented project it allowed us to lower tangent discontinuities to a maximum of 1.6 degrees (average 0.2 degrees), and edge discontinuities to a maximum of 6mm (average 0.4mm). With our approach, large scale double curved glass envelopes such as the presented Arena Corinthians West Façade become feasible and cost effective while staying true to the design intent.


BibTeX Entry:

@inproceedings{gpd-corinthians-2013,
      author = "Alexander Schiftner and Michael Eigensatz
               and Martin Kilian and Gery Chinzi",
      title = "Large scale double curved glass facades made feasible -
               The Arena Corinthians West Facade", 
      booktitle = "Glass Performance Days Finland Conference Proceedings",
      year = 2013,
      pages = "494 -- 498"
}

Large scale double curved glass facades made feasible - The Arena Corinthians West Facade

Online version of article:
Large scale double curved glass facades made feasible - The Arena Corinthians West Facade

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