Week 2 Journal Entry Biology has been perfecting its systems for billions of years. Designers today would do well with the aid of parametric generators to mimic nature and its components. That is one of many interesting aspects of such complex software like grasshopper that will benefit architecture in this generation. Times are changing, a lot of design professions are a notch higher than a lot of architects today distorting the ways of the past and bringing about more complex and exciting innovations to the table. We as architects need to do the same to keep in par in this age of technology.
The most difficult challenges often hold the potential for the most inventive solutions. The Eden Project designed by Grimshaw architects is one of the world’s largest greenhouses and is greatly inspired by the form and nature of soap bubbles dealing with the project’s main obstacle; to construct a huge structure spanning across uneven land. To resolve the challenges of the irregularity on site, the team proposed an idea to create a string of bubbles, the diameter of which could be varied to provide the right growing heights in the different parts of the building. The team explored a variety of different iterations of this bubble string and set them into 3D terrain models of the site. By overlaying the desired parametric modelling of the string of bubbles onto the 3D site terrain, adjustments to its design can be easily done through grasshopper perhaps to achieve the appropriate outlook in regards to terrain. The next challenge was to strive for the lightest possible structure. Studying a whole series of natural examples like carbon molecules and pollen grain, an analytical data is revealed that the most efficient way of structuring a spherical form is through geodesic arrangements of pentagons, hexagons or triangles.