Form Follows Force

Creating high-strength nodes is crucial to a structure’s overall ability to resist loads. Parallel to this is the importance for nodes to be optimally environmentally conscious. Architectural design can no longer afford to be focused on the development artifacts, conversely buildings today must reduce or more desirably, reverse the effects of climate change. Timber joinery may be the key to advancing current methods, allowing for circular life cycles, and aligning built structures with natural systems.

Material resourcefulness is often a key aim in any structural design to satisfy both economic and environmental targets. Topology optimisation can optimally distribute material to meet performance requirements. The advancement of computer and manufacturing technology has meant the attention of topology optimisation has been re-directed to integration with 3D printing technologies. 3D printing materials used commercially are often not environmentally conscious and posses little consideration for deconstruction.

Whilst CNC joinery remains common for parametric timber connections, and robotic milling increasingly so, wood sintering allows greater form freedom, grain and quality control, material resourcefulness and integration with the topology optimised design. Wood sintering offers an opportunity for interlocking timber connections to not only be adopted in construction more widely, but to be adopted in a different design language and more resourceful way.

The product of this research a set of topology optimised timber-only joints that satisfy select performance criteria. The proposed design methods calls for the re-vitalisation of the master builder, a role prevalent in traditional Japanese joinery. In the context of New Zealand construction the ‘Master builder’ has been lost in the pursuit for cheaper, stronger and faster construction. This role may be crucial to increasing efficiency and resourcefulness in construction, in a climate where authorship of a project is distributed amongst several different sub-trades.

Findings explore an non-conventional workflow for the generation of timber joints in a speculative and empirical way. Potential solution sets formed from the data will help to negotiate multi-software optimisation and advanced manufacturing, and give designers insights into how they could design components that were previously only “specified”.