Origami textures for adaptive plate and shell structures

The kinematic and static behavior of plate and shell structures based on origami patterns is investigated in view of their potential applications as adaptive surfaces in architecture. The broad, multi-disciplinary and rapidly evolving scientific contexts addressing origami design range from mathematics, physics, engineering and architecture. Restricting ourselves to architectural applications, we focus on the analysis of plate and shell structural solutions able to change their configurations in reaction to users’ needs or environmental inputs. The structural and geometric potentialities of adaptive folded surfaces stem from their unique capability of combining efficient resisting mechanisms, due to their corrugation, in statically constrained configurations, with the ease of varying their global geometry, due to rigid body motions, throughout the folding phase. Thus, starting from planar states, depending on the underlying folding pattern design, folding surfaces may take a variety of prescribed form-resistant spatial configurations.