Assessment of the structural, buildability and sustainability performances of the freegrid design baseline gridshells

Gridshell design is an intrinsically multidisciplinary activity that potentially involves architects, engineers, builders, and experts in mathematics and computer graphics. Correspondingly, the design of gridshell structures should comply with multiple design issue requiring different competences, mainly referring to structural mechanics, construction and sustainability. This makes gridshell design an intricate task, if compared to conventional structures. This study provides a deep insight into a methodological framework for their holistic performance assessment taking into account the intrinsic multidisciplinarity required when conceiving gridshell structures. The overall performance results from the linear combination of three partial performance metrics, namely structural response, buildability and sustainability. Each performance metric is defined by combining different design goals, identified on the basis of the current state of the art. The outlined methodology is then applied to three free-edge gridshells adopted by the FreeGrid benchmark and their fully-constrained counterparts. This application demonstrates how the adopted methodology is able to effectively reflect the performance of the examined gridshells, it allows to shed some light on the scarcely investigated mechanical behavior of free-edge gridshells, and potentially inspires future design solutions improving their performances within the FreeGrid benchmark.