The Pillars of Dreams is a public art installation by the artist Marc Fornes/THEVERYMANY. This particular piece is located in the recently renovated Valerie C. Woodard Center in Charlotte, North Carolina and serves as an outdoor pavilion for the community.
From a structural engineering perspective, these types of sculptures offer an opportunity to understand three-dimensional volumes created by two-dimensional surfaces. This specific class of structures, called “Surface Structures”, generate their load-carrying capacity through double curvature within a range of geometries that become self-supporting.
The nature of the surface structure causes an iterative formal process of adjustment and modification to determine a solution that falls within the capacity of the materials used. Once a form is derived by the artist and vetted by the engineer, the analytical process takes on a closer examination of components. The ‘surface’ is actually a quasi-surface created from overlapping discretized flat plate elements that approximate a continuous form.
Structural analysis of the assembled surface reveals clues about its performance at both a global and local scale. The diagram above shows stress concentrations at locations of surface discontinuity such as the valley intersections between the partial spherical forms at the top of the sculpture. Higher stressed areas are indicated in red and yellow to highlight these locations. Throughout the structure, individual plates are also subject to higher stresses and are highlighted to show local effects caused by plate orientation and overlap.
The behavior of the quasi-surface is much more complex than a contiguous surface and depends on the orientation of its component parts and its internal methods of attachment to approximate continuity. The analysis of such forms which considers all the component parts becomes a challenge to software and hardware computational limits. Therefore, incorporating greater scale and complexity become a constant process of exploration. This investigation also leads to an understanding of the structural behavior of Surface Structures in a way that becomes a craft in and of itself.
PROJECT TEAM
Artist: Marc Fornes / THEVERYMANY
