Structural Papercuts

This paper reviews and explores the topological properties of surface disclinations applied to elastic sheets and suggests how these properties may be reproduced at an architectural scale. A variety of surface disclinations and their translation from digital and physical formfinding processes to thin plywood prototypes are discussed. Initial phases of this research have been focused on the bending behavior of various sheet disclination types and have studied a variety of computational form-finding techniques that demonstrate this behavior in an architectural workflow. Several large-scale prototypes of architectural disclinations were produced to test the scalability of topologically induced surface curvature, discussed within the context of bending-active plate structures.