Parametric Structural Design

Zastavni, Denis [UCL]

The project of an advanced course on structures was born in September 2019. It focuses on the design of tall buildings. Mark Sarkisian (Skidmore Owings & Merrill San Francisco) demonstrated the close links that exist between architecture and structural engineering for high-rise buildings in his book Designing Tall Buildings: Structure as Architecture. The situation in 2020 did not allow us to invite Mark Sarkisian to Belgium. But the infrastructure deployed by UCLouvain for distance learning combined with the desire of teachers to invest in parametric structural design, opened up cutting-edge, innovative teaching: Students in pairs developed the structural part of building 500m high and its variants, calculated them through parametric definitions, programmed in an environment shared online with the whole class, allowing collaborative and interactive work, with specialist feedback from Mark Sarkisian directly from the USA during evaluation sessions. In this way the seminars taught architectural engineering students structural design, modeling structures, advanced calculations, and the basics of applied carbon foot-printing, and optimization.