Case Study: Peter Macapia achieves structurally optimized, organic architectural designs with Altair's solidThinking Inspire

Peter Macapia - Customer Case Study

Peter Macapia of LabDORA (Design Office for Research and Architecture) faced the challenge of rethinking how buildings are conceived — merging architecture and engineering so form and structure evolve together rather than in sequence. To explore novel morphologies and teach these ideas to students at institutions like Pratt and SCI-Arc, he adopted solidThinking Inspire (an Altair product) to push beyond traditional Cartesian grids and conventional analysis workflows.

Using Altair’s solidThinking Inspire, Macapia integrated design and structural testing in a single interactive environment that transforms force diagrams into multiple form and material options. The solution enabled a new “language” of deformable-surface structures, offered tremendous flexibility in altering load cases and materials, accelerated design iterations, and supported research and teaching by making structural computation a direct part of the design activity.