Every wall of the V&A Museum of Design Dundee is curved: sometimes both horizontally and vertically. This double curvature left architects Kengo Kuma & Associates with a problem. When a straight-walled building is constructed, there could be a difference of up to ten millimetres between plans and the final result. For the £80 million V&A Dundee, due to be completed in 2018, that gap could be no more than three millimetres.
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"Normally, we would set up the shape of a building with a 2D plan," explains lead architect Maurizio Mucciola. "But the shape of the building was too complex." Instead, Tokyo-based Kengo Kuma and structural engineers from Arup used advanced parametric modelling to create a 3D model. "If we had tried to build this from 2D drawings, there was a risk that the walls wouldn't have met," Mucciola says.
Using the 3D model as a guide, Arup carved a set of discrete moulds - there are no standard moulds made of wooden panels here - which held the concrete in place as it was poured in situ. Vertical walls mostly support themselves, but 90 per cent of the 8,000m2 museum's 21 separate wall sections lean out, so during the three to seven days that the concrete took to set, it was supported by a complex system of scaffolding.
The quantity, size and position of the scaffolding was calculated from the 3D model and could be adjusted as the concrete sagged. Once it was completed, Mucciola relied on the internal floors and the roof to ensure the three-storey building was rigid: "This interaction between parts forms the building's overall structure," he says.
The work didn't stop there, however. When the walls of the building - which is Kuma's first in Britain, as well as the first V&A museum outside London - were completed, 2,500 concrete panels were hung from them, each weighing up to 3,000 kilograms and spanning up to four metres. The idea, explains Mucciola, is to help the museum, which is set on the banks of the River Tay, blend into the rugged landscape by giving it the familiar appearance of a Scottish cliff-face. "The building sits gently," he explains. "Despite its solidity."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
