Digital Fabrication: Waffle Structure

MAAN Architect, an advanced architecture academy in Isfahan, curated this digital-fabrication workshop for selected students and invited Helioripple to lead it. The program introduced Grasshopper, the fundamentals of parametric design, and digital-fabrication workflows.

Students used Grasshopper to organize fabrication components while considering the forces required to support body weight. The first exercise explored furniture made with waffle construction. The next challenge was to design a highly porous, lightweight structure by clustering components and coding their notches. Classic machine-learning techniques were introduced through the Accord library in C# to cluster the units. The resulting cardboard structure served as a practical study in structural load distribution.