Canary Wharf Crossrail Station is London’s newest architectural showpiece. Foster + Partners designed a 315-meter-long building with four underground levels for the tube station and two above-ground levels with hospitality, public functions and an impressive green roof park. Absolute eye-catcher is the elegant curved roof, constructed of 1,414 laminated timber beams and 564 nodes of hot-dip galvanized steel.

Those steel nodes are the most technically complex element of the construction. More than half have a unique shape: a total of 348 different types were developed. This is because the wooden beams are never perfectly in line with each other and connect at different angles each time. Moreover, the diamond-shaped openings in the roof create additional variation in the number of beams that meet at one node-sometimes two, sometimes six. To keep this complexity manageable, all the nodes were parametrically modeled and produced with a high-precision 3D adjustable mold.