The Louvre in Abu Dhabi

Recently, at the F#unctional Londoners meetup group, Goswin Rothenthal presented how he used F# application scripting to construct an associative digital 3D model for the cladding of the Louvre Abu Dhabi Dome. The F#unctional Londoners is a newly launched meetup group whose purpose is to bring together Londoners with an interest in functional programming with F#.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi was designed by the architect Jean Nouvel. The complex dome construction is contracted to the Austrian steel specialist, Waagner Biro.

The geometric openings in the dome were inspired by the interlaced palm leaves traditionally used in roofing material. For the cladding of this dome more than 450,000 individual cutting and drilling patterns of custom aluminum extrusions were described and automated. Goswin Rothenthal developed an F# application to represent and organize all the dome’s cladding elements. He used Rhino and its .NET API to host the F# DLL for drawing and visualization. With this, they had an integrated work flow in a single parametric model, from the main geometry set down to the manufacturing data.

Read more on the architecture of the Louvre Abu Dhabi