Let's Shape 2025

The second edition of the summer school Let's Shape is an advanced training program for engineering and architecture graduate and PhD students, focusing on the design, analysis, and construction of gridshells and other lightweight structures through computational and experimental form-finding techniques. 

The Teaching Program

 The summer school combines specialized lectures and hands-on exercises to explore key aspects of gridshell design and construction. Students will learn the geometric principles behind gridshells, investigate material behavior, and study construction techniques with real-world applications. 

The course will cover numerical methods for designing bending-active gridshells efficiently, introduce advanced structural models for performance assessment, and use simplified mechanical models to analyze structural behavior. Additionally, students will apply optimization strategies to improve structural efficiency.

Students will work in teams, applying acquired knowledge to real-world case studies through both digital simulations and physical prototyping. They will apply form-finding techniques like dynamic relaxation and evolutionary optimization and use numerical models to design gridshells and simulate their stage-by-stage construction. In practical exercises, they will also build scaled active bending timber gridshell models, exploring how material properties, form generation, and construction feasibility interact.