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LOTUS TEMPLE RESEARCH
The lotus temple was designed by Fariboz Sahba and the construction and engineering was handle by Flint & Neill COWI. The building was open to the public in December 1986. It is renown for its Flowerlike shape ( Lotus).
The Temple is made up of 27 petals which are all suported by arches on the inside. These intricate petals were created at a time where computers where emerging as design entity. The Shell surfaces are formed out of parts of a number of sphere radii with they center located at different point in the building. Structural Design presented several challenges so they built a scaled model to study imposed loads, seismic loads, winds loads and temperature loads. Stability of the ribs were checked and as a results they were modified.
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For my research I wanted to see at first if it was possible to remove these interior steel arches and replace the last 9 petals in the inner layer into structural elements. I wanted to see if they could have eliminated the use of structural steel and reduce the overall cost of this building. My idea was to replace the 9 interior petals into Hypar structure. Replacing them into hypars would truly make the building free standing. My method was to form a triangle based on the perimeter of the petal and transform that into hypars. Once I Figured that first inner petals I wanted to see if it was possible to turn all the 27 petals into hypars and create a full free-standing building without any arches.
My final thoughts for my research are that designing this building with Hypars would have helped reduce the material cost and time of construction. It would have also decreased the number of people working on it. I also do think that by building with hypars a lot less engineering would have been needed. Since the math of these is relatively simple the maintenance of that building would have also been easier. But unlike the original building a lot of openings are now happening at the top and I think finding an efficient way to block weather up there would have been challenging.
