Constructive Frustration : From a flower to auto-morphing architecture*

In recent years, architects and engineers are seeking for alternative formation processes. A growing architectural urge to create complex shapes with high degree of variation and intricacy, stands in contradiction to the rising awareness to energy consumption, carbon footprint and material circular economy. Where we designers, architects and builders invest tremendous efforts in shaping matter to achieve morphological complexity, Nature demonstrates the beauty and efficiency of geometrically complex surfaces generated by self-shaping processes. Echoing the new understanding of material formation processes in physics, architecture too no longer sees matter as passive or ideally inert, but rather as a generative source for the development of form and structure. The theory of incompatible sheets describes the emergence of form and motion in matter, resulting from intrinsic material properties through stress-induced processes. Geometrical incompatibilities are prescribed in the material, making a flat ‘Frustrated Material’ that spontaneously configures itself into a predictable complex 3D shape. In search of robust materials suitable for architectural scale and environment, we have developed two material systems:  Frustrated Ceramics and Frustrated Composites. Going against ‘best practice’ which attentionally avoids the building of internal stresses in the fabrication process, we intentionally introduce incompatibilities; we do so by joining  materials of different shrinkage rate for the ceramics, and by fibre orientations and unbalanced laminates in the composites. Demonstrating the application of self-shaping principles in materials adapted to the architectural world- large scale, robust and durable - opens a new path towards sustainable materialisation of complex shapes, through auto-morphing architecture.