Origami for buildings: MIT folds aluminium into light, load-bearing structures
MIT researchers fold aluminium sheets in an origami pattern into modules said to be far stiffer while using less material. A sculpture about seven metres (23 feet) in size already hangs in Boston.
Archive image · Photo: 4300streetcar / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0 (cropped and resized)
A team at the Center for Bits and Atoms at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is bringing origami to construction. The basis is so-called Resch tessellations, folding patterns made of repeating units. Folded aluminium forms modules that can be joined into large, curved shells. According to MIT, the structures are many times stiffer than some other forms of structural origami while using about two-thirds as much material; simulations showed about 3.5 times the stiffness of some other origami techniques.
Software breaks the design down into many small subproblems and calculates each unit individually. "The connection is the same everywhere, even though each unit cell is different," explains lead author Alfonso Parra Rubio. That allowed a team with no professional construction experience to assemble "Lexicon" in a matter of days – a folded aluminium sculpture measuring about seven metres (23 feet) in the atrium of Deferrari Hall at the Boston Public Library.
"This work shows that folding metal is a method that is ready to be used for building structures," says Neil Gershenfeld, the center's director and senior author. The universities of Bologna, Innsbruck and Tokyo were also involved in the study, which MIT presented on 27 October.