Wood on the Plaza was a massive timber grid shell built on the plaza of the UMass Fine Arts Center for the spring and summer months of 2016. As a public art installation, its purpose was to demonstrate the beauty and new-age sophistication of building with wood. For more information, contact clouston@umass.edu.
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Also made possible by a grant from the UMASS ARTS COUNCIL
Fabrication photos
Link to our facebook page (and here) with many more photos of the shell under...
Building a Prototype
See time-lapse videos of module and prototype assemblies
Grasshopper Model
The grasshopper model allows you to see how the shell geometry changes when altering...
Double-layer bending
We made sure that the highest curvature of any piece in the shell was well...
Desk model
Several desk models were created to visualize the shell …
Structural FE model
A geometrically non-linear Finite Element Model was created to analyze the internal stresses due to...