Al Fisher’s scientific contributions

The paper is reflective of a design and delivery process through an interesting project in Scunthorpe in the North of England. The project is a community leisure centre and these buildings are often square and rectangular and uninspiring. The paper describes how a deliberately inventive and ambitious architecture was conceived to which the engineers responded also ambitiously with free form timber shells yet one which would respect also structural engineering logic of funicular shapes, and minimum volumes.

Much emphasis in computation has been put on the potential of building information modelling (BIM) and other software in the coordination of the design and construction process and on building performance. What, however, can modelling techniques offer to shift the focus to simulating the user experience? Shrikant Sharma and Al Fisher of Buro Happold SMART Solutions, which offers specialist computational innovation services to external clients, describe how their team has developed SMART Move, a crowd-modelling software that has been used in the development of the designs for Wilkinson Eyre's Exeter University Forum and Foster + Partners' Thomas Deacon Academy.

A collection of methods and algorithms are presented which aim to aid in the automatic designing of steel structural frames, under both deflection and stress criteria. A virtual work method is utilised assessing local contributions of members to global nodal deflections. It is the invention of the authors to apply these methods iteratively to indeterminate structures. Complementary algorithms which design members for stress have also been devised following Evolutionary Structural Optimisation principles. In this way an optimisation suite has been developed which can be used systematically to design structural frames. It has been found practically that this method converges on a low weight solution, with designs found much more expediently in comparison to typical beam selection methods. The implementation of these advancements in the form of useable tools for application by non-specialists is discussed. Finally possible directions for further work are proposed.

p. 1175-1186 Free-form computational modelling software places few limits on the imagination of the architectural designer. Engineers require new digital tools in order to realize these buildings and sculptures in an efficient and practicable manner. Collaboration between Buro Happold and Cambridge University has resulted in a toolbox of novel computational design tools which assist engineers and architects on projects with demanding free-form geometry; this paper presents two case studies which demonstrate just some of these tools. Outcomes have included: (a) development of new algorithms for true multi-objective optimization and for complex geometry synthesis (b) application of state of the art research to real projects, resulting in fully integrated optimization of structure, facade and internal environment.