Curved-crease un-foldable formwork for sustainable vaulted floors

UnfoldForm

UnfoldForm

Unfold Form is a lightweight, compact, reusable formwork system that rapidly deploys a fan-like, corrugated, self-supporting formwork through curved-crease un-folding. It enables the construction of thin vaulted floors in unreinforced concrete. This novel approach to sustainable floor construction was demonstrated at half-scale as part of Lotte Scheder-Bieschin’s PhD research.

Unfold Form is the first-ever construction system to use curved-crease unfolding as the deployment and shaping mechanism of formworks for  sustainable vaulted floors in unreinforced concrete. Bending-active plates connected with curved textile hinges, weighing only 24 kg, unfold on-site into a self-supporting formwork able to support 1000 kg of concrete. Unfold Form offers a robust, lightweight, reusable alternative to traditional formworks. It combines low-tech construction practices with sophisticated structural geometry, making it a groundbreaking solution for reducing carbon emissions and material waste.

The project was developed at the Block Research Group, ETH Zurich in a team of Lotte Scheder-Bieschin, Mark Hellrich, Tom Van Mele and Philippe Block. More insights can be found here and here.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me in case of interest or questions.

scheder@arch.ethz.ch or LinkedIn