Bifurcation tower consists of a component based material system, namely paper strips. Latest since Josef Alber’s preliminary courses at the Bauhaus, paper is implemented in the design education. Its relation of curvature and stability can be investigated in a very direct and haptic way.
For this project, the individual paper strips were developed on a triangulated mesh as shown already by Marc Fornes. In contrast to Fornes’ strategy of linear strips, where the mesh resolution in combination with bending plays a major role in the smoothness of the object, the authors used bending only to generate a smooth object, from a roughly triangulated mesh. Both approaches generate a self-explained assembly process, that replaces measurement by digitally defined and fabricated assembly points.
In order to understand and learn the material systems constraints, the students were asked in a first step to generate multiple mesh-based geometries in Rhino/Grasshopper. Mainly a physical simulation named Kangaroo was used by the students as it provides a simple setup and fast results. With this digital geometries, the first studies for the material system in paper were made. These results led to the above described component based material.

Students: Kaj Andersz, Tansu Atak, Markus Andreas Bilo, Alicia Büchel, Margarete Capello, Paolo Francesco Castegnaro, Hümeyra Eraslan, Caroline Elisabeth Fritz, Larissa Gabrielli, Melanie Gmeiner, Viktoria Hörtenhuber, Florian Juen, Muhammed Kianipour, Fatma Kilic, Moritz Knopp, Stefanie Küng, Andreas Matthias Leiter, Denis Novotny, Gabriel Raso, Lea Katharina Scholz, Hanna Seiwald, Robert Vergeiner, Leon Viktor Volger