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ZJA Zwarts & Jansma Architects have designed a new light rail departure station in The Hague, The Netherlands. The spatial roof structure of the station is made of rolled steel rectangular hollow sections arranged in two independent layers rigidly connected to each other. A glass envelope covering the roof structure matches the contours of the steel exactly. Since the diamond-shaped glass panes could only be attached to the outer layer of the steel grid, the panes (with edge lengths of approx. 1.30 m) are supported on two sides only. When optimizing the overall geometry, the double-curvature area at the nose of the roof structure became a special focus. Knippers Helbig Advanced Engineering has managed to minimize the deviation of each single glass pane from the single-curvature geometry to a maximum out-of-plane deformation of only 3 mm. Therefore, the project is a great example of how geometry development can influence structural design and enable new approaches.

The Bory Mall Shopping Centre, designed by the Italian architect Massimiliano Fuksas, is a mixed use development located on the outskirts of Bratislava, Slovakia. The roof to the shopping mall's central plaza is a free-form steel gridshell. The concept for its shape is consistent from the footprint to the shape of the grid nodes. The gridshell is assembled from standard rolled steel hollow sections but uses the freedom created by individually shaped CNC-milled grid nodes to achieve a smooth transition between high slenderness at the bottom and the necessary stiffness at the top. Working in close collaboration with Massimiliano Fuksas Architects, Knippers Helbig provided support for the development of the roof structure right from the start of the project and rounded off their services by providing detailed design of the free-form central ”Tornado“ facade grid nodes, which were fabricated and built by Metal Yapi.

A 6500 m² glazed grid shell dome covers the Nazarbayev Centre in Astana, Kazakhstan. Located near the Presidential Palace, this futuristic building, designed by Foster Partners in London, is one of a whole series of prominent architectural buildings in Astana. The 20° inclined glass roof spans across various levels of the reinforced concrete structure and slopes down to the north. The dome has a span of over 90 m and a rise of about 11 m. A sufficient in-plane stiffness of the rectangular grid of the dome is achieved by the rigidly connected rectangular hollow sections, which are framed by a strong circumferential edge beam. Connections of the grid and edge beam are bolted mainly as a means to cope with the ambitious time schedule that required fast erection during the strong Kazakh winter. By means of a statically determined support, the roof grid and edge beam of the glazed dome remain largely independent of the concrete structure’s long-term and deformation behavior. A major issue for the roof structure was the verification of global buckling of the dome. In order to minimize tolerances, all connection surfaces of bolt joints were CNC milled. This article summarizes the design philosophy of the dome steel grid and the relationship between glazed dome and main concrete structure.

Lazika is a new city in Georgia located on the Black Sea coast. The one-hundred meter long Lazika Pier with its 31 m high landmark sculpture is one of the first structures to mark the beginning of the development of this new metropolis. The sculpture designed by German architect Jurgen Mayer H. consists of stacked oval elements – so called blobs – organized in seven levels. The blobs are subdivided into vertical plain levels running in an orthogonal direction with a distance of 90 cm. Due to the exposed position, tough requirements concerning corrosion resistance and a pretty tight timetable for design, fabrication and erection, structural steel has been chosen as the building material. The sculpture consists of steel plates with varying thicknesses of 5 to 10 mm. Elements composed of plasma-cut plates were pre-fabricated within a site workshop and installed using mobile cranes. Exterior and interior lighting features provide a dynamic and pulsating look to the sculpture.

Shenzhen Airport’s Terminal 3 is one of the largest buildings in the world designed with parametrically controlled digital tools. These tools enabled the teams from Fuksas and Knippers Helbig to develop the free-form, perforated, double-skin building envelope into which a space truss structure is integrated. The inherent optimization potential of the iterative process not only facilitated the geometrical definition of a large number of unique, non-repetitive components, but also resulted in a successive performance improvement for the integrated structural system. In a close collaboration with the architects, specific solutions were developed to provide sufficient structural integrity for the space structure, which is clad by the facade layers. These design interventions enable the mega-structure to withstand all impacting loads, such as high winds and seismic loads, without disrupting the transparency of the architects’ intended honeycomb-shaped perforations. The design process of the new Terminal 3 clearly demonstrates how parametrically controlled design tools can offer the means to design new structures and envelopes that go beyond existing typologies.