Multiple Natures – Taiwan Tower

The Taiwan Tower will become an innovative landmark people will identify with in present as well as in future times.Therefore the tower should not state a fixed meaning or image, but trigger people to invent and create their own interpretations of the tower’s meaning. To evoke multiply and diverse images the tower has to be illusive and complex. soma architecture architects developed a scheme with engineers  Bollinger + Grohmann with a fibrous structure that emerges out of the interplay of many individual members, forming a synergistic whole. The Taiwan Tower celebrates diversity and will become a dynamic and contemporary democratic landmark.

The towers structural topology is not defined in a traditional structural design process. In contrast to this a bottom-up method is established, that lead to a structure with emergent load bearing capacities. By using probabilistic optimization methods complexity in the topology of structures is achievable, that directly derives from static capacities, but do not explicitly show the underlying load bearing principles. The inherent load bearing quality is not readable at first glance and emerges as the result of the complex interaction between the single members.

To do so, the towers final geometry was generated by automatically creating, calculating and comparing more than 2,500,000 alternative solutions. The continuous eight foots of the tower were given by the architectural concept. To achieve a stiff structure these have to be connected by diagonal members. The array of diagonals was changeable in the design process. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to drive and control this process. Benchmark for performance of each version was the structures self weight and its maximum deflection due to the governing loads. In such a generative process the correlation of one single element with every other is considered in every calculation step. Thus complex load bearing behavior can evolve. A new and pulsating architectural and at the same time structural design arises!

Structural members showing compression/tension, wind utilisation/deflection 20x, earthquake utilisation/deflection 20x

Modern probabilistic structural design methods are used to achieve an unique irregular structural topology, that is reacting to its boundary conditions.