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A woman standing inside a sweeping concrete shell lined with a purple knitted textile

KnitCandela

MUAC, Mexico City · 2018 · Block Research Group, ETH Zurich, with ZHA CODE

A thin, sinuous concrete shell built on a knitted formwork that travelled from Switzerland to Mexico in a suitcase.

KnitCandela was built at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City for the first exhibition of Zaha Hadid Architects in Latin America. It is an homage to the shell builder Félix Candela, reimagining his concrete shells through new computational design methods and KnitCrete, a CNC-knitted formwork technology. The whole formwork weighed 55 kg and was carried to Mexico in a suitcase.

How COMPAS was used

The shell was form found with compas_fofin, the COMPAS package for form finding of cable nets and shells.

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