A chinese straw hat had inspired Shigeru Ban when designing the roof for the Centre Pompidou in Metz. A striking image. But the straws in this 8,000 sqm roof are wooden beams with a cross-section of 14 by 44 cm. 18,000 running meters of them had to be indivdually CNC-fabricated to braid this structure. designtoproduction helped creating a reference geometry of the roof and provided the timber construction company with the necessary CAD-tools to efficiently define, detail, and produce nearly 1,800 doubly curved wooden gluelam segments. | 
