KAPSARC-Tensile Fabric Building Skin

摘要

Zaha Hadid Architects and Arup have designed an iconic building in Riyadh Saudi Arabia known as the King Abdullah Petroleum Research Centre. Various departmental edifices are formed into a contiguous closed architecture by spanning the 'streets' and 'courtyards' between the buildings with translucent, double-skin membrane cells. The concept is to provide shade and ventilation without obscuring light or allowing direct penetration of sunshine. The resulting structural skin is an intelligently arranged composite of steel and fabric, random and organic in appearance and with a daring sculptural form. The challenge to the engineering team was to harness a repeatable structural strategy across a large range of varied geometries. The challenge to the form-finding and patterning team lay in creating a large family of coherent shapes of conical membranes where within each cell there is very varied pre-stress and graded compensation required. The challenge to the membrane provider was to identify a glass-PTFE fabric that would provide the translucency and strength required by the architect's demanding specification. The challenge in fabrication and installation was to produce the extreme shapes and set them perfectly on site.