Recent Architectural Engineering Projects Using Rapid Prototyping

In today’s construction industry, with the introduction of new materials, free-form shapes of buildings, special problems with historical preservation, LEED Certification of buildings and even buildings with very large components that move, there are many new challenges for architectural engineers. This paper highlights some of the work done at Milwaukee School of Engineering by undergraduate students in summer of 2002 and 2003 that links architectural engineering with our Rapid Prototyping Center. This work started as research under the Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Solid Freeform Fabrication program at MSOE. This is a program sponsored by the National Science Foundation. In the past projects have ranged from replication of historical decorative plaster details, writing code to translate drawing files into a form that can be read by the rapid prototyping machines, to modeling a building designed for Milwaukee School of Engineering by Santiago Calatrava. More recent projects have explored the use of Visual Basic to translate drawings into a form that can be utilized by rapid prototyping (RP), a method of using RP and photo stress analysis in the design of point supported glass, and two projects that utilize GIS data and RP to study the Milwaukee River Watershed. An encouraging side benefit of this undergraduate research has been a high percentage of our REU students going on to graduate school.