Lucas and his team recently completed a project with Marks Barfield Architects to design an arts café for the new Bullring in Birmingham. Based on a Fibonacci spiral, the café is a sweeping frame comprising a series of steel ribs. “By establishing the parametrics of one of the steel ribs, we were able to develop a whole series of ribs to produce the desired effect,” says Lucas. “We also used this process to simplify the fabrication of the structure by ensuring the cladding for the ribs could be machined from flat sheets.”

SolidWorks’s parametric functionality enables structural engineers such as Price & Myers to begin 3D modelling in the very early stages of the design process, since changes and design evolutions can be made with confidence. “Designing something parametrically gives you the freedom to develop a design in an organic way, safe in the knowledge that the resulting structure will still work within your initial design and engineering boundaries.”

“We wanted the stadium to follow a number of design objectives,” explains Tim Lucas, founding partner of Price & Myers 3D Engineering. “It should have an undulating form to capture and mirror the movement of the crowd beneath and each surface should be slightly different.” Lucas and his team set up a 3D parametric model in SolidWorks to form the basic skeleton of the framework and primary structure. Then they added the lines of the secondary structure to show the cladding of the roof.

“Once we had established the design parametrically, we were able to work with the architects to evolve the design until everyone was happy with the result.” Says Lucas. “Throughout the process we knew that any changes were being made within the parameters we had established, and therefore we wouldn’t lose the engineering integrity of the design.”

The final design features a series of triangular surfaces, made from fifty different types of cladding and all of slightly different angles. “It’s a triumph of mass-customisation,” says Lucas. “Every section is different, but they all have the same principles and since SolidWorks creates all the engineering data required by the fabricators it’s actually not an expensive or complicated job to manufacture.”