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A blue knitted ribbed shell with a large oculus, raised on slender steel props outside a museum
Photo: Mariana Popescu

KnitNervi

MAXXI, Rome, Italy · 2022 · Block Research Group, ETH Zurich, with TU Delft

A flexible formwork for ribbed concrete shells, combining a bending-active gridshell with CNC-knitted shuttering.

KnitNervi is a pavilion-scale demonstrator of a flexible formwork system for ribbed concrete shells, built for the exhibition "Technoscape: The architecture of engineers" at the MAXXI museum in Rome. Inspired by Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzetto dello Sport, it avoids complex, wasteful moulds: a bending-active gridshell is both the formwork and the integrated reinforcement, and KnitCrete, a CNC-knitted stay-in-place shuttering, encloses the form-found, compression-only geometry.

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