Abstract
This work explores the design and digital fabrication of elastic timber gridshells integrating principal meshes. These networks guarantee, among others, planar faces discretization, node offset properties and orthogonal meetings of the components what simplifies the joining solution for what demountable right-angled wood-wood carpentry joints have been used. A design-to-production workflow has been addressed employing a bottom-up and construction-aware design strategy to deal with geometric complexity in early design stages by means of computational design methods resulting on a much simpler manufacturing process by means of accessible carpentry machinery such a 3-axis CNC router. The use of active bending lets the structure to be erected from initially slender straight laths and to be covered by developable strips what makes it possible to machine all the elements of the pavilion on plywood boards with just one tool, varying only the thickness of the support according to that required by each component. The methodology has been successfully validated through the construction of a small 7.5m span temporary prototype.
