Design Guidelines for Zero Waste Manufacturing of Freeform EPS Facades

The application of curved facade designs in contemporary architectural practice has become adamant in combining the digital tools with the material properties. By expanding the focus to manufacturing as well, the topic of waste is introduced. In order to avoid the generation of waste material during fabrication, in this research a workflow is introduced which describes the design of freeform surfaces out of expanded polystyrene blocks (EPS), while producing zero waste. The main premise is that a piece cut out of an EPS block has a piece that is left inside the block, its complement. Following the premise, it is only necessary to design one half of the freeform surface over a desired facade area and the other part would align to it. After the freeform surface is generated, a tessellation process is described, prepared for robotic hotwire cutting, following the limitation of the EPS block dimension and the inclusion of the minimal insulating layer.