METSÄ WOOD HACKATHON at FABLAB | OWL

On November 20th, the fourth Open Source Wood hackathon was held together with Ostwestfalen-Lippe University of Applied Sciences in Detmold, Germany. The hackathon events are part of Metsä Wood’s Open Source Wood initiative, aiming to increase openness and global collaboration in the use of wood in construction.

The idea of holding the hackathon in Detmold started from an Open Source Wood award-winning project called ClipHut. This flexible building system originally started as a university project to research wooden joints. The team behind ClipHut invited Metsä Wood to hold the next hackathon at Detmold School of Architecture and Interior Architecture.

The 18 participants, students of the Master of Integrated Design (MID) , were divided into four groups and given the challenge of designing a new building in the university area using wooden modules and elements. The school has a strong emphasis on computational design, and this certainly showed in the teams’ approach to the task.

“The teams quickly started turning their ideas into 3D models”, says Tuukka Kyläkallio, project manager for Open Source Wood at Metsä Wood. “It is exciting to see what impressive designs the participants were able to create in just one day.”

After the busy day, a project called “Modular Grid Structure” was voted as the best design of the day. The design consists of a roof made of a hexagonal grid supported by grid columns. This modular, laser-cut structure can be efficiently prefabricated using a computational model. Using Metsä Wood’s Kerto® LVL products for the construction makes it strong and easily expandable. In the winning team were the students Mahmoud Abdel Mohsen, Maria Eero, Max Müh and Pavel Furtsev. The group was also given the opportunity to test their design with a model produced in the university’s laboratory.

“I think the Open Source Wood hackathon gave the students an ideal framework to focus on a specific, challenging task and, moreover, to explore various design options in a short time. The development of a structural building system made of wood provided the essential foundation for a material-oriented, integrative design development process combining advanced 3D modelling, digital manufacturing, rapid prototyping, programming and architectural design,” says Hans Sachs, a professor at the University.

Read more and see all the hackathon designs at https://opensourcewood.com