Civil Engineering March 2022 | Vol 30 No 2

CONCLUSION This building will form a new centre of excellence at UCT and will help to create an environment in which collaboration and new ideas can flourish. Closely aligned to the ethos of the d-school, the project was made possible via innovative and collaborative thinking and teamwork, as well as systematisation and careful coordination of the installation. The result is a building capable of encouraging and eliciting design thinking, with the structure itself providing a learning opportunity, as the exposed gridshell allows students to see first-hand how the building fits together. It also ties into the collaborative idea that through teamwork individuals can create something meaningful. This integrates well with UCT’s goal of being a “living laboratory”, a campus where students and staff can interact with research and real-life examples in their fields – in this case, an innovative structure, designed, fabricated, and built via an international collaboration, with environmental sustainability at its core.  Civil Engineering March 2022 15 Installation of the free- form steel structure Glass panel installation underway Interior rendering showing the steel gridshell and the combination of edge clamped and point supported glass (Credit: LEAF/Novum) Nonlinear finite element analysis of the glass panel under a 100 kg maintenance point load (left image: stress plot; right image: deflection plot) This article was compiled with the assistance of Jonathan Ray, Partner at KHM Architects, and Richard Perez, Director of the Hasso Plattner School of Design Thinking at UCT.