Everything is Curved: The Mercedes-Benz Museum,Stuttgart, Germany

In the Mercedez-Benz Museum, Stuttgart, organisational and spatial strategies combine to yield an elegant form. Its presence, formal balance and refinement of features, along with its continuity of surface, create a building that is spatially and formally opulent. The structure rises above its context, while achieving harmony through its spatial configuration, which defies gravity - cars and people are able to drive and walk up the building. Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos of UNStudio describe here how they set out to achieve this by dedicating the spatiotemporal experience of the museum to motion and reiteration. Copyright © 2007 Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos.     

Mechanical and damage behaviour of mortar–rubber aggregates mixtures: experiments and simulations

The reuse of rubber wastes of worn tires in aggregate form, to serve as a building material, is appreciated to preserve environment. This study aims to examine the mechanical behaviour of a mortar–rubber aggregates material. A multi-phase model called 2M2C (2 Mechanisms and 2 Criteria) which take the volume fraction substitution of rubber into account is investigated with the help of stress–strain curves. The proposed model is based on the localization of the stress on the phases level (rubber and mortar, respectively) and the homogenization of the local plastic strains. The model has also incorporated an isotropic damage variable to describe the loss of compressive strength. The experimental tests are well simulated by the model. Also, the simulations provide local informations such as damage evolution and local plastic strains.     

Prediction of fabrics mechanical behaviour in uni-axial tension starting from their technical parameters

On the basis of a phenomenological study, which consists in determining the response of a fabric sample to the traction and the relaxation, we proposed a rheological model with 15 coefficients. This model of mechanical behaviour in uni-axial tension takes into account the elastic and the viscous components. To characterize the coefficients of this model, simple tension and relaxation tests were performed for 29 fabrics in the warp and the weft directions. An artificial neuronal network trained with a retro-propagation algorithm performs functional mapping between these mechanical coefficients and the technical parameters of fabric, which allowed us to predict the mechanical behaviour in tension and relaxation of fabrics starting only from their technical parameters.