AGEMAR building is the headquarters of one of the biggest private ship owners in the world, Yiannis Agelikousis. Architect of the project is Rena Sakellaridou.
Agemar Building is one of the first buildings in Greece to have a curved surface, a “fluid” form that requires three dimensional design to construct the outer shell. It’s interesting that international bibliography refers to this new “trend” in iconic architecture as “parametric”.
My participation in the project consisted in designing the stainless steel frame of the outer shell in a precise 3d model on behalf of “Ieronimakis Inox”, one of the biggest stainless steel factories in Greece. The 2d drawings that described the frame were done by the civil engineers of the project “Pagonis – Polychronopoulos – Kinatos Co”.
I was invited to this project by the contractor “Intrakat” and the subcontractor “Ieronimakis Inox” that had undertaken the task to construct and position a 200 tons, stainless steel metal substructure, upon which the marble shell of the building was going to hang. The marble shell consisted of 14.000 pieces, 80% of them different in shape, curved by a 5-axis cnc machine. Most of them were cut and ready for positioning at the time. The frame was given to the civil engineer of the project (K. Polychronopoulos) to design and he was in the process of it when I was called in to design in 3d, to produce shop drawings for construction. The topographers (AKSM team) and the stainless steel factory (Ieronimakis) were both involved in the construction of the main auditorium of the Renzo Piano Opera, in which we collaborated with success in geometrical complex constructions.
Unfortunately, in Agemar project there was no construction 3d model for the coordination of the subcontractors. Each of the subcontractors was standing on each own. Moreover, there was an urgency regarding the timetable of the stainless steel factory, that had to do what the others did in some years’ time, in just few months. I was hired by Ieronimakis to do the job of providing the 3d model between, in situ, reinforced concrete frame and cut 3d marbles, also almost ready and waiting. We were lucky enough that the marbles were designed in Autocad 3d by the marble company Smili (3d designer for Smili: D. Papadeas) and were compatible with my preferable parametric software, Solidworks. In collaboration with the topographers’ team we decided to 3d scan all the necessary beton edges, in order for me to have, a model with the marbles and the reinforced concrete in place, in order to add, in 3d and absolute accuracy, the stainless steel frame designed in 2d by Mr. Polychronopoulos team and his exceptional collaborator P. Papadeas.
It needed more than a year of full commitment to define in space, the engineer’s team concept for the frame. I did some minor improvements to facilitate parametric design. There was really a big effort by my side, for the 3d model to be able to provide work for the factory in real time. The result was a mammoth complex construction consisting of 81.000 stainless steel solid bodies.