Peter Barnes Photography www.engineeringnews.co.nz 7 before any of the façade had been designed or detailed. The challenge The architects had developed a 3D zero thickness surface model of the inside of the desired facade. The highest priority and the biggest challenge was ordering $10 million of glass due to manufacturing lead times, before anything else was designed. Creating cutting details for the glass was the first challenge, followed by the details of the window frames and then the supporting steel. The design of the supporting steel between the glass and the existing building was particularly challenging as there was no possibility to change either the glass (as it was pre-ordered) or the supporting structure as it was already there. Curving triangular structures are typically built using round hollow steel sections, but this facade design called for rectangular sections thereby dramatically increasing the complexity of the steel fabrication. Unlike a jigsaw where the challenge is to guess where every part goes, labelling over 250,000 components was vital to ensuring no guessing was necessary on the construction site. The solution All of the software vendors we spoke to shrank from this challenge, says Jason Dent, 4th Dimensional Facade Spolutions founder. “Autodesk Inventor had proven itself on several previous projects, but no one had tried anything this big, so we imported the surface model and the project just evolved from there.”
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