Long-span Roof Design

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Team Members:  Jingwen Wang,  Kelsey Wittels

For my MIT's first semester main project, we designed a long span roof for MIT's courtyard #14. The goal of the design was to design a roof structure that will incorporate aesthetics with its structural form, and visual continuity of the adjacent spaces. A few major considerations we had to keep in mind while designing the roof were the structural efficiency of the design, the thermal bridging of the interior space and overall structural weight.

We designed the structure using HSS steel elements moment connected at each node. The HSS grid was shaped in an anticlastic curvature (double curvature) to give it additional resistance to deflection. Finally, we added tension ties to minimize the horizontal thrust from the roof onto the adjacent building. 

Below are a few images that show the overall design of the roof, and its loadpath.