Designing self-Airy shells with unreinforced boundaries

A self-Airy membrane shell is a special type of shell structure whose shape coincides with the shell’s Airy stress surface. It provides the convenient property that any polyhedral discretization of such a surface will automatically generate a mesh in funicular equilibrium. A self-Airy shell designed for a uniform vertical load would simply have a constant isotropic Gaussian curvature. However, a challenge in implementing a self-Airy shell in architecture is the lack of a design method, especially in designing unreinforced boundaries. Those are singular planar curves, where the two principal curvatures approach 0 and ∞ individually. This paper presents methods for designing unreinforced boundaries of self-Airy shells, including both smooth and discrete methods. These methods work for both positively and negatively curved surfaces. The proposed methods work linearly without iteration. The preliminary results show that the seemingly very restrictive conditions admit a variety of non-trivial surfaces.