Structural design of the Erdos Museum Evelope

Abstract

The Erdos Museum's envelope is designed as a very irregular and huge stone, with an approximate diameter about 110m, altitude of about 40m. The level projection area is 10000m2, and the surface area is 20000m2. As the museum's envelope is a spatial free form shell, its curvature changes at random. Many long or huge skylights are decorated on the envelope with strict limits that only one direction members can traverse the skylights. In order to reflect the architect's vision faithfully, the structural model is built completely relying on the 3-D model that architect provides. In this paper, the modeling and calculating methods of a spatial free form shell is developed valuably. As the shell shape of this project is unique, the structural systems of space-truss, singlelayer shell and double-layer shell are compared in the paper, and the shortcomings of the three structural systems will affect the function, or result in construction difficulty. In order to meet the demands on bearing capacity and deformation capacity of the structure, and reduce the construction difficulty as far as possible, this paper presents a new structural system: stiffened single-layer latticed shell, which combines the advantages of beforementioned structural systems. It cuts down the working procedure of the secondary structural form-finding processes between the roof (walls) trusses grid areas in space-truss system, and solves the problems of the large deformation and poor stability in single-layer shell system. At the same time, the total number of the components in the stiffened singlelayer latticed shell system is less than half of that in double-layer shell system. The difficulty in structural installing and shortening the construction period can be solved by adopting the new structural system.