Crazy night...with models.

I did it with a model. Jealous?


A potential roof idea. Walkable, allowance for northern light/possible southwesterly wind scooooop. Stay tuned.

On the seventh day...

Much has happened between, but now it is time for a much needed update.

The Cirque training centre has given me much difficulty. Initially, I began with the idea of using words to guide my design process. Cirque defines itself with three; dexterity, grace and daring.

I tried to create a form that encapsulated all of this by designing something that gave visitors a feeling of floating, or bringing them to another plane that they couldn't be on otherwise.

That led me to this:

Forms hovering above the ground, with the idea of ascension present in most of the early schemes. However, the bulkiness of the program, such as the height of the training spaces made it feel much less graceful and dexterous than I intended. And so, I scrapped it.

Then I read. Rick Joy is an architect from Tucson, Arizona who seems to be getting some attention these days. His semi-recent book, desert works, has a foreword by Steven Holl, and an introduction by Juhani Pallasmaa, which is where I have found my new inspiration.

Pallasmaa writes about the desert in a way that made me think of it as something other than just sand and rock.

"The immense emptiness of desert landscapes such as the African and Australian Sand deserts or the all white expanses of snow above the Polar Circle, radiating a strange appeal and emotional power. These settings erase the traces of man and evoke an experience of timelessness. The total absence of vegetation exposes the naked skin of the earth and turns the landscape into a tactile and muscular experience. Landscape becomes an extension of the human skin.

...

It is probably the sublime vastness and the sense of a divine void that has attracted these artists. The desert floor provides the tabula rasa for creative work that breaks from the confined and conditioned spaces of cities and museums. It gives a new context to the endeavours and products of modern man. A rusting carcass of a car appears brutal in a setting of lush greenery, but appears a fragile memento of human vulnerability and the vanity of human effort under the desert sun."

This has inspired me to think of the flat landscape as something much more than a spot to 'place' the building, but to think of the ground as something that will become a part of the building.

But what form will it take? How will it be fully resolved? Stay tuned.

UNLV Charette Follow-Through

Though the 6 hour charette between UNLV and Ryerson was a success for many of the faculty and critics in attendance, the final component of the project for the Ryerson students was to take the work proposed at the end of the exercise and use it as a "beta test" for yet another iteration of the design challenge. This allowed students to examine a biomimetic design idea and refine it on an individual basis.

For example, while the charette may have elicited a project such as this:

The charette design only served as a beginning point in the iterative biomimetic design process.  Below are three iterations prepared by individual Ryerson students in less than two days as a response to the charette proposal outlined above.  Take note that the biomimetic concepts and sustainable strategies have been retained yet the formal, tactical, and aesthetic dimensions vary as each student has adopted a different stance on the initial concept design.

Samples of Tricia's Redesign:

Samples of Sam's Redesign:

Samples of Mitch's Redesign:

Furthermore...

Biomimicry? Probably not, but it happened and I don't regret it.

A MITCH (ha) needed update

Last time, on Mitch, we saw various plants which I intended on 'biomimicking,' including Mangroves, Banyan trees, Whitebark Pine, and my personal favourite, creeper tendrils.

As I explored my options more, I increasingly seemed to be turning to the creeper tendrils, which seem like a great opportunity to emulate for my bridge. The twisting of the tendrils allow for a much greater rigidity than the minimal form of them would suggest.
As I moved forward with this design, it began to develop as a bridge which literally twisted in the same manner as the tendril, but as a bunch of them.

The central sketch in this image shows the thinking behind this. It would be a series of rings, with steel rod supports between to provide the overall structure. These supports would be connected with details like the ones shown below.

I had even begun to develop a script that would allow the bridge to adapt to different conditions, which may be an unnecessary use of grasshopper.

Upon further though, I felt that the number of tendrils was beginning to take away from the concept, and it was beginning to look unlike a creeper at all. I took a step back and began to think about how the plant actually supported itself, leading me to two solutions, twisting, and the cross section of the tendril itself.
This, however, was abandoned. Going back to twisting, I began to look at tensegrity structures as suggested in a critique.
Like this, but on its side. I like that tensegrity structures allow for a great deal of strength with relatively little structure, much in the manner of the creeper tendril. So, this idea is being developed, as can be previewed in the following details.

In the Beginning.

In my initial research, I found myself drawn to the spectacular rooting mechanisms of Mangroves, which I had the opportunity of viewing firsthand on a visit to the coastal mangrove forests in the Dominican Republic.

Mangroves are able to root into shallow coastal marshes, where few other species of plant are able to survive, providing habitats for a variety of different fauna. A young mangrove can even be 'deployed' floating until it finds a suitable area to root.
Looking at these roots led me to the Banyan tree, which grows from the top of the forest canopy down towards the ground, creating light, near space frame structures.


However, due to the obvious structural difficulties of building a structure from the top down, along with the randomness of the space frame created, this idea was cut down. (Nice Pun!)

Next up then, are various creepers.



(See it happen at 1:40) A creeper tendril will wind itself until it touches a potential support, wind itself around it, and then strengthen itself by creating a curling 'bridge.'

This interesting spiraling has led me to seek out other forms of torsion strengthening in nature, leading me to the Whitebark Pine, where the direction of the wood fibers can deviate up to 30 degrees from the direction of growth.

More on that here: http://asknature.org/strategy/e70b6b7753773a7177fe8358ec26ed2c

Hopefully this will lead to some interesting structures. We will soon find out.