Attempted Morphing With Graphic Statics

Maintaining the inner relation between the form and its force is the fundamental condition for designing architectural forms well. Even though many factors could influence architectural forms, such as history, culture, or materials, etc., the most important one is the force of its structure-without proper relation between the form and its force, architectural design cannot be built.The relation between forms and forces is the field in-between the architecture and the civil engineering. So, we need to think about on what kind of viewpoint we stand to discuss this issue.Today one trend to solve informal design problem is to relay on digital structural analysis, such as computer-aided finite elementary analysis (FEA). This solution is no doubt a progress, but such high dependency on digital structural analysis would pay a risk:architects might ignore the knowledge of mechanics, which is the architectural education tries to avoid.But the algebra-based structural knowledge teaching for architectural students stands on the opposite of the geometry-based thinking in architecture design. And the traditional statics prefers analyzing the given forms to matching the changes of forms.To explore the design method for architects’creation, the statics needs possess two factors: intuition geometrically and operation dynamically during form finding.The current knowledge system of graphic statics has developed systematically and efficiently, but did not unfold the essential generating relation between the form and its force, which would help graphic statics suit for dynamic design process.So, this dissertation attempts to build up the inner logic between different balanced forms based on graphic statics, and we call it Morphing with Graphic Statics (MGS). The basic operations are three parts:the form generating without the change of external forces ("right or left", "in between", and "up or down") and the form generating with the change of external forces ("in the joint", "near the joint", and "parallel to the joint"). Then with in-system actions ("merge", "overposition" and "temporary balanced object"), we could create lots of free forms.The dissertation is divided into five parts:Part one:Questions and the subject. In this part, we discuss the meaning and aim of this research, the relevant literature review and its framework.Part two:Theoretical analysis. First we discuss the brief history on graphic statics, and explain the properties of graphic statics which were not really introduced before, so that architects could understand its usage and its possibility for design.Part three:Theoretical construction. The design method of MGS, as a development of graphic statics, is proposed after previous analysis. We first discuss its different notation from current graphic-statics notations. Then we prove and deduce its basic operations in three essential situations: the change of internal forces, the change of external forces, and putting those two parts into systematic application with necessary actions like merge temporary balanced object or overposition.Part four:Methods application. With MGS, we could first explore the diverse change of forms from simple to complicate in certain structural types. With MGS, we illustrate how a simple one centric load triangle frame could develop into several types of roofs. With MGS, we attempt to explore the form beyond the architectural-design application.Part five:Conclusions and prospects. The last chapter summarizes the dissertation, and points out its inadequacies, and proposes its potential topics for further research.