Abstract
There has been a long tradition in making ice structures, but the development of technical improvements for making ice buildings is a new field with just a handful of researchers. Most of the projects were realized by professors in cooperation with their students as part of their education in architecture and civil engineering. The following professors have realized ice projects in this setting: Heinz Isler realized some experiments since the 1950s; Tsutomu Kokawa created in the past three decades several ice domes in the north of Japan with a span up to 25 m; Lancelot Coar realized a number of fabric formed ice shell structures including fiberglass bars and hanging fabric as a mold for an ice shell in 2011 and in 2015 he produced an fabric-formed ice origami structure in cooperation with MIT (Caitlin Mueller) and VUB (Lars de Laet). Arno Pronk realized several ice projects such as the 2004 artificially cooled igloo, in 2014 and 2015 dome structures with an inflatable mold in Finland and in 2016–2019, an ice dome, several ice towers and a 3D printed gridshell of ice in Harbin (China) as a cooperation between the Universities of Eindhoven & Leuven (Pronk) and Harbin (Wu and Luo). In cooperation between the University of Alberta and Eindhoven two ice beams were realized during a workshop in 2020. In this paper we will present the motivation and learning experiences of students involved in learning-by-doing by realizing one large project in ice. The 2014–2016 projects were evaluated by Sanders and Overtoom; using questionnaires among the participants by mixed cultural teams under extreme conditions. By comparing the results in different situations and cultures we have found common rules for the success of those kinds of educational projects. In this paper we suggest that the synergy among students participating in one main project without a clear individual goal can be very large. The paper will present the success factors for projects to be perceived as a good learning experience.
Highlights
This part of the paper will give a short summary of the most important ice projects/structures in the past
Professor Lancelot Coar has been testing the potentials of ice in structural shells at the Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology (CAST) at The University of Manitoba since 2010
Over the past seven years, professor Coar has built six ice structures with student participation[5]. This past winter, Coar partnered with Dr Sigrid Adriaenssens and Michael Cox (Princeton University), Dr Lars De Laet (Vrije Universiteit Brussel), and Mark West to create a fabric formed ice shell supported by a bending active frame
Summary
This part of the paper will give a short summary of the most important ice projects/structures in the past. Isler is mostly known for his thin shell structures, where he used the physical principles of nature as his starting point He made ice structures by spraying water on fabrics or inflatables in winter at low temperatures. In the north of Finland, Matti Orpana developed a method for creating igloo-shaped ice hotels with a span and height of 15 m. They were the biggest one-surface igloos made with an inflatable mould. The ducts were sprayed from the outside with a fog of water after the forming of the ice shell at the outside the inflatable was removed and the ducts where sprayed on the inside of the igloo.
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