Studio Air // James Gibbs // Part B (midway)

Studio Air // Part B

James Gibbs // 607591 Tutor // Chen Canhui

B.01 // Research Field: Geometry

The Turbulences FRAC centre // Jakob + MacFarlane Architects

Built in 2013 the project was designed as an exploration computer generated design referencing the historical context in a new way, literally causing a “zone of turbulence (and therefore the name). The Volumes created by the meeting of the two geometries (referenced by historical context on site) are extruded vertically and stretched over the court and toward the city.

From what I understand of the building the idea was to create a building that looks like it was growing out of the site, not in terms of biomimicry but in terms of growing out of the relevance of the site and its context, the type of design that doesn’t explicitly have a form.

The form then is derived out of finding a way to conceptualise the impact of a the overlap of two historical events on the same site. although the concept behind the design seems purposely vague the geometry itself is more interesting.

Hylozoic Soil, 2007 // Phillip Beesley

Made up of a network of micro-controllers, proximity sensors, and acuators, the Hylozoic Soil is an interactive environment. modeled parametrically and being digitally fabricated, the system responds to the movement of occupants through the geentle ripple motions that occur throughout the acrylic skin. A series of sensors embedded into the skin communicate with the arduino board which send signals to a number of actuators to control the movement of different “breathing pore” components to gently brush against people in the space.

I was drawn to this architecture due to this interaction with its occupants, a strong connection in kinetic architecture that responds to the direct touch of passerbys by. I am very much interested in this kind of an interaction within my own designs, and less interested in something that is only mean’t to be seen. I’m looking more into some that interacts with our other senses, most likely touch.

B.02 // Case Study 1: Geodesic

SmartGeometry2012: Gridshell // MATSYS

Run over 4 days at SmartGeometry 2012, this workshop focused on the design and construction of a wooden gridshell. the team used only straight members of wood bent along the geodesic path to create a small self supportive structure. the team used parametric tools to minimize the material waste on the project while still maximizing its presence.

The geodesic properties of the design are shown to be limited by the materials used in construction. in this way the form of the building itself is derived not from the mind of a designer to look this way originally, but in the way that they were able to manipulate the wood and let its limits suprise the team. similar to the way the ICD paviliion was generated through material performance.

Membrane // Species 1

During this iteration I was really experimenting in creating some kind of membrane that could possibly be added to the geodesic domes. after changing the original geometry and trying to fit the geodesic through the points I became in the imperfect lofts that had begun to come out of the geodesic accidents

Solid Arcs // Species 2

Here I reworked the arcs through each geometry, looking into the structural properties of the shapes i was creating. The last one in the series went to single wide boards that had a centrepoint and streamed out, the idea was a connecting centre point similar to the many in a geodesic dome, however with just one pice in the centre and allowing the rest of the boards to support eaach other. it looks very weird and I doubt it would work in real life, but it was worth experimenting on.

Structural Piping // Species 3

Unknown // Species 5

Here I simply was messing around with the location of the beams in the geosdesic mesh. testing the limitations of the possible curves that came out of the geometry

Geodesic Trees // Species 4

This series was more sporadic that my last ones, I was more looking for a species to suprise me, the first part was looking into how to triangulate the lofting over the original form and then I looked into these cubic shapes along the paths of the geodesics. The goal was more to create some 8-bit looking version of the geodesic and seeing how the form would react to the shapes I was pumping in.

Relfection // Species Evaluation

My intention with this species was to create a forest like series of geodesic inspired little trees. however I couldn’t get the geodesic to curve enough around each individual tree to spurt up enough individual spires. From this I did however gain some knowledge in how geodesics actually work, what my limitations were.

During this exercise we were expected to experiment with the overall goal of the original style, in my case to experiment on how I could manipulate the geodesic qualities on different geometries. i found that adding more beams across the surface gave a more complex final geometry. form this I gathered that the complexity was lost if i tried something to big. the scale of the design definitely helped add a complexty and liveliness to the final.

Also i found muyself a bit limited in geometric shape, the geodesic qualities only worked on certain geometries and I’m not sure if I’d continue to stick through it in the next case study. However a good part bout starting out here was the better understanding of how the materialty affects the geometry and possibly carry this through into the next part of the project.

B.03 // Case Study 2: Boimimicry

Canopy, Toronto, 2010 // UNITED VISUAL ARTISTS

“Inspired by the experience of walking through a forest’s dappled light, Canopy is a 90-meter long light sculpture spanning the front facade of the Maple Leaf Square building in Toronto, Canada.

This permanent architectural installation is made of thousands of identical modules, organised in a non-repeating growth pattern. Their form, abstracted from the geometry of leaves, reflect nature. A combination of daylight and artificial light sweeping through the work recalls the activity of cells within a leaf, leaves in a forest canopy, or a city seen from the air.” ~United Visual Artists The project came to my attention while researching for case study 2.0, where my tutor advised that the project after expressing my own concerned that the geodesic patterning structure was too restricting in terms of form.

During my research I was excited to see the extra non-architectural side to the project, the side most likely done by coding the lights to react as if you were walking through a forest. I felt like this really would engage pedestrians (mostly at night) as they walked through the literal canopy.

Identifying the Canopy’s pattern at first seemed a frustrating task since i couldn’t get a decent direct view of the under side of the project head on rather than at an angle. However upon discovering this as a cairo pentagonal tiling, I was able to begin on reconstructing the geometry in Grasshopper.

Reverse Engineering // Canopy, Toronto, 2010

Upon further examination of the pattern scattered across the Canopy project I noticed diagrammeed out the shapes I could see and the repetition of certain elements. in this case i noticed that each pentagon was made up with 2 right angles on its interior and this was common across all the pentagons.

In online research I was able to find the exact tesselation I was looking for (as seen below) but ran into trouble without lunchbox installed with grasshopper.

Hexagon section proved to be much simpler with lunchbox, however once I moved into creating the pentagons that would divide up the hexagons I ran into trouble. In order to create the pentagons I needed to find the points along the edges of each pentagon and drawn them from there.

My tutor was able to help me with the tesselation and gave me the push towards the final reincarnation I was able to produce

Although first of all I needed i middle line to draw the division of the pentagons and then I could draw in the connecting lines to make pentagons.

From here I had my basic pattern done, and could go about mixing the pattern up or experimenting with the typr of form I could use it on. This mean’t making the pattern 3 dimensional, and led me to offset each face and loft between the original and the offset faces.

B.04// Technique Development

B.05// Prototyping

B.06// Site Proposal