Very happy to attend the one-week (29th Jan. - 2nd Feb.) Computational Architecture workshop held by VCC, KAUST. 5 experts（Eike Schling, Dominik L. Michels, Florian Rist, Helmut Pottmann and Peter Wonka）from architecture, geometry and computer science gave related talks about the reasonable and scientific ways to design things. 
I attended it together with 13 other architectural undergraduates selected from Saudi Arabia. It was my first time attending an architectural workshop, very interesting and fruitful! Not only I learnt how are the differences between theory, optimization results and the actual constructed model, but I also learnt some new experiences from the 10 girls and 3 boys, how they came up with their design ideas, how they handled construction details, and how they caught up with time to gave attractive presentations successfully.
Results
In the first afternoon, at the guide of Prof. Eike Schling, we built this beam shell with a triangle face at the top.
This model was made together with Xinye Li and Bolun Wang. We bent 12 straight congruent strips and fixed them with 36 joints at computed positions to construct. We tried to get an asymptotic net as orthogonal as possible, which is corresponding to a minimal net. It is a trivial result, but it took us two days to finish it (in fact, we replaced the first day's plan and only took one day to finish together with the presentation). During the construction time, we met many small problems, like how to choose good joints, how to bend the strips against with its resilience, how to bear the small pins from the FRP strips, how to group the 12 strips into a near rotational shape, how to make the intersection angle as 90 degree as possible... Thanksfully, the result was not bad.
Here is a zoom-in view of the model.
After we tested with three kinds of different joints, the final one can even make the two families of strips rotate, which forms the kinetic behavior of the asymptotic shell (left). This deformed progress can be simulated by Kangoroo in Grasshoppper. The two families of strips can be unrolled into flat rectangular shape in plane.
Presentation
I gave the around 10mins’ presentation together with Xinye, here is the pdf
