TERA X | Braided Wood

Solid-wood mono­fil­a­ments made of wil­low are to be in­ter­wo­ven on a ful­ly au­to­mat­ed ra­dial braider to cre­ate high-per­for­mance se­mi-fin­ished prod­ucts for build­ing com­po­nents with high strengths and de­grees of de­for­ma­tion and de­sign qual­i­ty. The pro­ject cre­ates new con­struc­tion and de­sign-rel­e­vant struc­tures for the build­ing in­dus­try with a new lan­guage of form, a com­bi­na­tion of light, pleas­ant wood sur­faces with the bind­ing and de­sign di­ver­si­ty of braid­ing. In this way, the lightweight con­struc­tion po­ten­tial of tex­tile and wood merges, which ex­pe­ri­ences an ad­di­tio­n­al ap­pli­ca­tion ad­van­tage through the re­source-ef­fi­cient, sus­tain­able braid­ing pro­cess and the man­u­fac­tura­bil­i­ty of near-net-shape struc­tures with low waste quan­ti­ties.

We de­sign tubu­lar forms with in­creas­ing com­plex­i­ty, which we gra­d­u­al­ly im­ple­ment 1:1. In this way, we ex­plore the pos­si­bil­i­ties opened up by our ma­te­rial wood thread (see re­search pro­ject FLIGNUM) and tech­ni­cal ra­dial weav­ing, as well as the lim­its of au­to­mat­ed weav­ing with wood, which the ex­per­i­men­tal re­search pro­cess be­tween de­sign and en­gi­neer­ing sci­ence re­veals to us.

TERA X is a joint re­search pro­ject of the re­search plat­form BAU KUNST ERFIN­D­EN at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Kas­sel and the In­sti­tute of Ma­te­rials Sci­ence at Hof Uni­ver­si­ty of Ap­plied Sci­ences.

This pro­ject was fund­ed by the Fed­er­al In­sti­tute for Re­search on Build­ing, Ur­ban Af­fairs and Spa­tial De­vel­op­ment on be­half of the Fed­er­al Min­istry of the In­te­ri­or, for Build­ing and Home Af­fairs of the Zukunft Bau re­search fund­ing pro­gramme.