WaveShell

from Portfolio 2024 _ Dimitra Chantzakou

Tower^2

The main idea for this project is to create a central space which will host passenger drones, while serving as a landmark on Pier 52 of the San Francisco Bay. The design separates the vertiport in two parts, which operate independently for both take-off and landing. Passengers enter the control and waiting area located in the small building on the side of the central structure and can freely walk across the canopy to board a drone, or go to the garden on the other side. The central structure was created using kangaroo physics and its structural elements were optimized using the Karamba3D plug-in in Grasshopper. The project was completed in a timeframe of 3 weeks.

Mati was the protagonist of the 2018 wildfires in Attica, with fatal consequences. One of the main problems of the area is its lack of urban design and planning, leaving the built environment to develop arbitrarily.

Our proposal considers the natural characteristics, as well as the “memorial” aspects regarding the wildfires, re-creating the urban tissue in its totality. We re-design the road network, focusing on safety and orientation. We create parks and open spaces to resurrect, preserve, and highlight existing natural areas that were trespassed, while adding some much needed public uses. We re-organize the plot distribution, designate buildable zones within each plot to control the void-solid ratio in the settlement, define height limit zones, and set the Floor Area Ratio, to maximize natural lighting and maintain the existing small building scale. Finally, sets of pedestrian streets are introduced locally in each urban block, creating internal centers and connections between plots. In an attempt to give a more holistic design proposal, we study the configuration of planting on streets and in the parks in a larger scale, selecting species and controlling their placement. We zoom in a bit further, in the urban design scale, to provide some examples of benches and flowerbeds, designed to match the overall concept and complete our proposal.