Sentient Rock

Year: September 2021-January 2023

Team: Deeksha Basawaraj, Le Lyu, Waner Zhou, Ziwei Guo

Type: Post Graduation Research Thesis (M.Arch) at AADRL, London

Role: Design, Inflatable Patterning Research, Material Research and Visualization.

Software used: Autodesk Maya, Houdini, Unity, Rhino, Grasshopper, Unreal Engine, Photoshop, Illustrator,

Sentient Rock is a design research project where the possibilities of using air as formwork, resulting in the landscape as the prototype, are explored. This project aims to propose a construction strategy that uses air as a medium to establish a dialogue with the existing landscape. Set in locations with particle materiality like deserts, modularity becomes the strategy to develop a robotic system that uses inflation to generate voids, as an infrastructure, where air and wind become a medium of their control. The system utilizes the dialogue between agent and landscape to create a spatial organization strategy that is responsive to the everchanging environment. It is an initiation of a living rock strategy as a conceptual apparatus with which we think of land formations. The project then continues to explore ways in which a sense of permanence and timelessness can be brought to these spaces by solidifying and shifting the states of the dynamic particle materiality by utilising the material behaviours of the dominant material in the context, namely sand and salt, but in the end, the context returns to its original state leaving no trace of any activity.