CROSS FABRICATED SCALES

The project was selected for realisation at an annual AIA call of entries that asked for interventions to bring to life the historic city of New Orleans. Gernot Riether’s project suggests a series of pavilions sited within usually hidden, often private courtyards. With the city’s webpage announcing different events at their locations the forgotten places turn into new public destination. The pavilions are reactivating the city’s fabric by reversing it - what was a private space during the day becomes a public space for concerts, performances, and other events at night.

In the evening, the pavilions dramatically modulate the host environment, bringing attention to the city’s romantic and mysterious spaces, typically located deep in the block, away from the street. The first pavilion was realised in a courtyard, located on Orleans Street, close to North Rampart. From the street you can only see glimpses of the alien-like, bright glowing object. For curious residents and visitors, brave enough to enter the courtyard through an existing long narrow alleyway the strange object is revealed to be a beacon, an event space of open possibilities.

The pavilion was developed at the ‘Digital Design Build Studio’, that Prof. Gernot Riether directs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In his studio he is researching the possibilities of digital design and fabrication in order to develop new construction methods for environmentally friendly materials. With his project in New Orleans Gernot Riether shows how plastic can be used to build a new kind of lightweight structure that is affordable and environmentally friendly.

The 200 sq ft pavilion is developed from 320 variations of a single cell. Each cell is generated from different sets of attributes that are derived from the cell’s unique position within the overall form, different architectural and structural requirements and unique site conditions. Scripting allowed for parametrically transforming each cell’s geometry differently into seating, foundation, light fixtures, plant holders and rainwater collectors. The final overall form and spatial qualities of the pavilion emerged from networking the cells into a multifunctional building envelop.

The complexity of the cell’s digitally driven typology allowed combining structure and envelope in a single material hybrid system. The edges of each cell were folded differently based on each cells location within the overall structure. This provided stiffness within the cell. Connecting the edges of all cells form a complex geodesic system. To minimise the amount of material used for the envelope and to create a lightweight structure, the envelope generates wormholes that act brace- and column-like. The formation of wormholes within the surface increases the surface tension, which stabilised the structure of the pavilion. This allowed minimise the weight of the structure to 120kg.

by Lori Zimmer, 07/15/11

Israeli startup SolarOr has developed a brilliant new transparent solar panel that is modeled after the complex forms found in honeycomb. Called BeeHive PV, the solar panels are designed to integrate into building facades to serve as energy-generating windows. Each sheet is covered with hundreds of tiny prisms that focus sunlight to maximize energy generation.

The solar panels are made from durable acrylic, which can also act as an insulator. Each honeycomb cell sucks up the solar energy and amplifies it two and a half times, due to the panels’ hexagonal shape and double-glazed glass. If installed on sun-facing walls of buildings, the panels could produce 140 watts of electricity per square meter.

SolarOr thinks that the patterned design could add texture and aesthetic interest to projects. The cells are slanted within each panel in order to absorb the maximum amount of sun. The slanting is customizable as well – arrays can be tailored to particular projects and locations.

The building-integrated photovoltaic company is currently raising funds and hopes to start manufacturing the panels for commercial use in the near feature.

+ SolarOr

Via Giga Om

Location: Pugh Hall, University of Florida - Gainesville Date: 18 April, 2011 Time: 6:15pm - 8:15pm

Panelists: Neil Leach, Wendy W Fok, Stephen Belton, Lee-Su Huang * Panel Discussion will follow the Keynote Lecture by Professor Neil Leach

here is that little program that unfolds and tabs things for you, its pretty easy to use… but it only works for meshes… for rhino i export a .obj with polygons/lines, and then once unfolded i export this as a .dxf back to rhino, scale it correctly and run rhino nest to get the optimal arrangement for laser cutting.

http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/

(submitted by John Quinn)

Materials beyond Materials: Composite Tectonics-A Conference on Advanced Materials and Digital Manufacturing hosted by SCI-Arc on March 25-26 in Los Angeles (960 E. 3rd Street, LA). Free admission. Taking place on the SCI-Arc campus in downtown Los Angeles, the two-day forum open to the public and the community at large will explore technological advances in composite materials, innovations in construction, and current design discourse—with some of the most important names in today’s building, fabrication and design industries. Participants include: Michelle Addington, Yale School of Architecture; Andreas Froech, Owner, Machinuous; Marcelyn Gow, Partner, servo LA; Kurt Jordan, structural engineer; Bill Kreysler, Kreysler & Associates; Greg Lynn, Principal, Greg Lynn FORM; Urs Meier, Empa, Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology; Mike Lepech, Stanford University; Achim Menges, Institute for Computational Design, Stuttgart University; Eric Owen Moss, Director, SCI-Arc, Principal and Lead Designer, Eric Owen Moss Architects; Bill Pearson, North Sails One Design International Ltd.; Wolfgang Rieder, CEO, Rieder Composites; Marcelo Spina, Co-Principal, PATTERNS; Nader Tehrani, MIT & Founding Principal, Office dA; Peter Testa, Principal, Testa/Weiser & Founding Director, of the MIT Emergent Design Group; and Tom Wiscombe, EMERGENT. Materials beyond Materials combines progressive presentations in the fields of architecture, the arts, engineering and materials research. Conference participants will present and discuss their most innovative ideas, projects and positions concerning materials, technology and the impact on the architecture and construction disciplines and professions.

Populate Object (Surface) through Tiling - with Controlled Thickness Edited By Wendy W Fok  

PopulateObjectSurfaceTiling-Thickness.3dm (Click to Download Rhino Sample File) PopulateObjectSurfaceTiling-Thickness.ghx (Click to Download GH Definition)

  Courtesy of Yushang Zhang, Rajiv Sewtahal, Riemer Postma & Qianqian Cai

Yushang Zhang, Rajiv Sewtahal, Riemer Postma and Qianqian Cai (with studio tutorAlexander Sverdlo) shared with us their project, “Vertical Village: A Sustainable Way of Village-style Living”, which was awarded the first prize in the d3 Housing Tomorrow 2011 Competition. The competition called for transformative solutions that advanced sustainable thought, building performance, and social interaction through the study of intrinsic environmental geometries, social behaviors, urban implications, and programmatic flows.

The d3 Housing Tomorrow competition assumes that architecture does not simply form, but rather perform various functions beyond those conventionally associated with residential buildings. More images and architects’ description after the break. 

Courtesy of Yushang Zhang, Rajiv Sewtahal, Riemer Postma & Qianqian Cai

What we strive to explore in this medium‐density housing project is a new way to obtain the joy of village living without occupying as much land resources as traditional villages do.

A traditional village provides its habitants with various plots to build their unique house which shapes or reflects different lifestyles. However, a village occupies too many land resources which should belong to nature. A high-rise residence provides efficiency and capacity, but personal domains lose the uniqueness they should have. Therefore, we came up with the idea of the “3D plot” to provide a third choice called  “Vertical Village”.

 based on the 3D Voronoi algorithmic system, which can translate the relation of points into interfaces to divide a certain volume into individual cells. If every cell is owned by one family, by changing the positions of points, we can create various 3D individual domains.

 A special rule controlling the generation of points is that every point should be relatively orthogonal to its nearest point, so that every cell will have its largest surface being perpendicular or parallel to the horizon. Some activities, like cooking or studying, can rely on those orthogonal surfaces, while others, like gardening or having a party, can happen in those irregular parts. Therefore, both practical and dramatic spaces have been defined by this system.

Like the embryo living in its egg, each family can decide where and how to put their house inside their 3D plot. A series of cells are designed as circulation and public facilities to provide habitants with conveniences and places to have collective activities.