The following is an abstract from Archinect's article on Aug. 28
Broadly speaking, construction of the Beijing Water Cube (Olympic's Aquatic Center) proceeded in two phases: erection of the framing and installation of the cladding. The architects and engineers conceived of the internal structure, or skeleton, as an extension of the arcane Weaire-Phelan principle. In 1993, physicists Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan set out to find the answer to an aged scientific mystery—how the shape of soap bubbles is formed. They discovered that these shapes aspire toward maximal volume for minimal surface area; thus, they observed that cohering bubbles aren't round, but rather odd-sided polyhedrons, all clung together in an organic array of shared-sides that resembles naturally occurring structures: the honeycombs of a beehive or the osmotic renderings of a cell.
They next developed a geographic model that reproduced this randomized lattice-work, then experimented with virtual slices of these shapes. The result is the seemingly-random (but repetitive enough to be feasible to construct) pattern visible on the exterior walls of the Cube. In tangible terms, then, the building's skeleton is constructed of steel girders—nothing intrinsically thrilling about that—but the shapes sketched by the girders are something else entirely. Not your usual complex of criss-crosses, of triangles and trusses, the Aquatic Center's members mimic the dazzlingly random patterns of agitated water.
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ETFE is temperature-resistant, lightweight (1/100th the weight of glass), recyclable, non-toxic when exposed to flame (it actually shrinks away from heat, thus helping to vent smoke out of a burning building), highly insulative, non-porous, and non-stick. Even better, its high-tensile strength makes it easy to manipulate—it can be spun into thin sheets for ease of transport then inflated on-site to create the "pillow" effect of the Aquatics Center walls. It can also be finished in varying degrees of translucence—as transparent as glass or opaque as glass bricks—a quality that, along with thousands of LEDs installed in the individual ETFE sections, facilitates the Water Cube's phosphorescent metamorphoses.
The case of the bubble is a typical example of the classical problem of maxima and minima in mathematics and physics. The isolation of a minimal and a maximal principle appears in the works of the Ancients through the development of modern physics and calculus as the solution to physical problems, as for example when the minimum energy is extended to perform a given action, or the minimal path is taken by a particle or a wave. The pure minima and the pure maxima are brought together in states of economy, like the engineering problem solving a maximum span with minimum material (i.e. bridge construction).The soap bubble is itself an engineering achievement, covering the maximum volume with the minimum surface area at the same time producing a self-supported structure.
[see Atlas of Novel Tectonics, pg.151]
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