blog of undefined architecture
I am taking a pause from blogging for a while to pursue and organize some projects. I hope to be back with new things at the start of the next year. Thank you to everyone who comes and visits. And if you have questions or comments please still feel welcome to leave them.
Matei Denes
I currently have work in a show in LA. It is organized by Superfront LA, a collective that promotes architecture through exhibits and publications. I am very proud to have been selected along with some of much more accomplished designers, including Benjamin Ball, Brendan Mcfarlane, Craig Hodgetts, and Marcus Novak.
From the curators:
“Film has influenced architecture since the dawn of the modern era. The creative process for entertainment as well as spaces for life and work share common ground. Perhaps film influences the profession of architecture through its speculative spaces which are removed from the constraints of reality. These instances serve as inspiration in the creation of the architecture of tomorrow.”
I have three pieces in the show. That are taken from projects that I completed in the last few years. Here is the statement I submitted with the work:
“The images presented here are taken during the design process for various projects that I have done over the past three years. Their abstract quality removes them from this process. The usual sequence of idea becoming design becoming built artifact is interrupted at a point before the design materializes, between idea and realization. As opposed to traditional architecture and its forms of representation, these images have no reference to time. Similarly they are framed to have no recognizable horizon or perspective rendering them spaceless. These images taken out of time and space remain frozen instances of the digital. They are spaces that would normally be folded into the final building. Extracting these images creates a new space and time for them to inhabit. That is the space of the viewer. And as they have no time or space of their own, their original references are lost. This gives the viewer the ability to project their own ideas. If we look at the design process as a temporal function, as the word process implies. Then these become still frames taken from that process. They have no inherent direction, either spatially or temporarily. But yet they remain tied to both space and time through exactly this incompleteness, needing the viewer to add these back into them to give them meaning.”
I have presented this work previously on this site in the Painting post. The three images shown here are the ones that were selected for the show. I have continued this work and have images from some of my more recent projects that are in the same style.
I would like to thank the people over at Superfront again for giving me this opportunity and hope that anyone reading this that is in LA before the end of August stops in and sees the show.
These images continue with the ideas that I began earlier in the Painting post. They are from more recent projects. If you go through the archive you may be able to match the images with the projects they are drawn from. But that is not the idea, which is to create a new abstract space that exists on its own. This allows these spaces to be reinterpreted and new ideas to emerge.
These images are more abstract than the previous series. Patterns of repeating similar elements dominate these spaces. This implies an infinite space that continues on past the edge of the image. A continuous field is created from the object of architecture.
The design process produces many of these moments. And I believe that these moments are as beautiful on their own as they are a part of the final object.
Right now I am working on a design for a lamp for the Acadia 2011 Conference.
At work we have finished a competition for the Hong Kong – Shenzen Border. But results will not be announced until July so the project will sit in storage until then.
And we are starting a new competition. Which, for similar reasons, will not be up for a while. But the work is being done. This time an opera house in Korea.
I have updated the diagrid post with some new images. Just to do something.
I also in the pipeline is a baby. More on that later too.
And until I do have something to show you, please enjoy my good friend Diego Ricalde and his firm MMX’s new pavilion.
At the start of the year I participated in the ModeLab Hybrid Prototypes Workshop. This gave me an opportunity to learn how to use arduino and its Grasshopper interface Firefly. Arduino is a digital electronic interface which is a beginners introduction to working with electronics. Firefly allows users to manipulate the input and output in Grasshopper and Rhino. This can be a powerful tool to create interactive projects.
Because the workshop was only for a weekend we were able to develop only some basic prototypes. We learned how to directly program the arduino board through an interface based on processing. This was then integrated through Firefly into Grasshopper. The possible uses are being expanded constantly with the implementation of web based sensor tracking and webcam monitoring. The overarching principle is that the more we can connect different devices and create inputs and outputs, feedbacks and interactions, the more our environment will move away from a static model and become a dynamic space.
I was interested in the possible feedback mechanism that could be embedded into the prototype. I made a simple canopy that could tilt and bend.
The tilting and bending were controlled by sensors on the underside of the canopy. One sensor measured the light and the other the bend of the canopy. These sensors fed information into grasshopper and that was then optimized based on a given target value.
This way I was able to control both the tilt and the bend based not on direct inputs, but based on feedback from the sensors. If there was too much light the canopy would lower, or if the bend was too much it would open up. As one parameter changed the other would adapt to compensate for the change.
The electronic setup and grasshopper definition were actually quite simple. The next step with this project would be to feed the input through grasshopper’s galapagos evolutionary solver and kangaroo physic engine. This would allow the prototype to self optimize for bending based on a desired lighting condition. While I was not able to achieve all of that over the weekend, I do hope to add both those tools to my kit to go along with firefly that was a great start. I want to thank the guys at studio Mode and Lift architects for the workshop.
I recently competed another competition. This one was for a multi-use building in Fargo, North Dakota. The results were not what I would call interesting, but I was very happy with my own results. I worked on this project mostly on my own, with some help from Dennis Park and Daniel Yep Taboada.
There are two main ideas that I tried to work on in this project. Connectivity and distribution. These came together under the general topic of reticular networks. These networks are connective tissues that form fine meshworks around bodily organs. For this building I was interested in how to combine and connect the different programs of office, housing, retail, and public spaces.
The programs became the organs inside the body of the building (not sure how that relates to Deleuze and his body without organs). The connective tissue became a diagrid structure that wrapped around different zones. At certain points these zones are joined by bridges.
The distribution of the program was done using cellular automata. This is mathematical process that has gained some attention within computational design. It is a rules based system that are governed by on/off states of neighboring cells. This can be used to control density and create interesting patterns.
Here I used two sets of rules. One for the base where the density needed to be higher and a different set of rules for the towers. Based on different starting configurations and variations on the rules I created a large repertoire of options from which to develop a final design.
The seeming random patterns created by the cellular automata were perfect fit for my desire to develop public spaces through out the site. Different opportunities presented themselves as the units varied on different levels. These spaces emerge from the process and provide the type of unexpected results that computational design can achieve.
Another aspect of cellular automata I wanted to take advantage of is its modularity. Because it is based on repeating of the same unit through multiple iterations, I wanted to combine this with modular apartment types. After developing several apartment types I wanted to see how these could fit into the the structure produced by the cellular automata towers.
This is one of the aspects that I would have liked to work on more. It would have been nice to run this through an optimization sequence, where the different towers are evaluated to see which meets parameters based on programmatic needs such as how many 2 bedroom or 3 bedroom apartments are in each. Because of the short time frame of working on a competition I was not able to achieve this. Another aspect that I would have liked to work on is to develop the diagrid envelop into a manifold surface that moves through the open public spaces. This would have not only created a greater degree of connectivity, but also blurred the relationship between inside and outside and public and private spaces. but overall I think this is strong project that opens many avenues for further research.
The results from the last competition were just announces. The Fargo Infill competition was seemingly more interested in generic urbanism more than work of architecture.
I have also posted more images from the Taiwan Tower competition.
I also recommend the comments section of this excellent post.
And I have updated my blog roll. So please check out the links to the right.
In the past year I have done some work with the diagrid. It is a commonly used structural framework. Probably the most recognizable building using this system is the Gherkin/Swiss Re tower in London by Norman Foster. This technique has many things working for it; it is very flexible, it uses the triangle, a very structurally stable shape, as its basis, and it also ensures planar surfaces. These aspects, especially its flexibility make it a very attractive tool in computational design.
I have used it mainly in a couple of tower designs, though it is also included in the latest competition that I finished. In these tower projects I have found that even though the basic principles are the same, because of the differing parameters that are incorporated, the way it is modeled in grasshopper is quite different.
This is a topic that has been broached by Daniel Davis at his excellent blog Digital Morphogenesis. He has noticed how little we reuse solutions for the same problem, often starting from scratch when someone else has already figured it out. I have found many of problems he discusses with using the grasshopper database, but my focus here will be on the specific issues in my diagrid studies.
The diagrid can be defined very simply in grasshopper, by subdividing a surface and connecting 3 of the resulting vertices of each resulting subsurface. As you can see below the inputs and variables are straight forward, just a surface and how many divisions you need.
But this is only the start, once you add parameters and have specific outcomes that are required the definition becomes quite complicated. The actual division process of the surfaces remains the same, what changes is are how you achieve that surface and what happens to it after.
The first example is from a tower I began developing for work. Though the project never got off the ground the diagrid was one of the first things I worked out about it. It is tower that twists and tapers. I wanted to able to control everything inside grasshopper so there is no input geometry, but a lot of variables inside the definition.
Because all the control happens inside the grasshopper definition the are many variables, including 4 controlling the twist, 4 controlling the taper, and 4 controlling the basic shape of the tower. There are also variables that directly affect the diagrid, such as the number subdivisions on each facade and how many floors to use for each of the modules. The diagrid here is modified to create intersecting “x” forms, which are the structural modules. To achieve this each diagonal is split in half and redefined based on a point between the two. While a planar surface was not required, the structural members did need to intersect to create a rigid frame. This creates an interesting effect as the surface and the structure pass through each other, as can be seen below.
The next example is from the Taiwan Tower Competition that I recently completed. Here again the diagrid works as structure, but also as a facade, so we returned to the triangle. But in this example the triangles are alternating left and right, which differs from the repeating pattern shown in the basic example. This effect was used specifically because the plan was based on a rotating “fat triangle” and we shifted the diagrid vertically to generate a structural pattern that worked with the rotating plan.
For this definition the inputs were a base plan geometry and points at which this geometry would be copied. The variables included the rotation of the tower and the scaling of the “floors.” Here there is no subdivision of the surface, as that would have taken away from the rotating/shifting strategy that was implemented.
The final example here is also taken from the Taiwan Tower Competition, but is part of an early study that we abandoned. But I think it is worth showing because it takes a completely different approach. The inputs are a curve and an attractor point. The variables control the height, number of elements, and shift, as wells as the strength of the attractor.
As you can see there are no surfaces in this method, instead it uses curves. The goal was to create continuous curves as opposed to the segmented sections of the typical diagrid. This leads to completely different organization and look to the structure. Not a true diagrid. The idea comes from birdcaging wires.
These examples are obviously only a small sample of the possible approaches to creating a diagrid structure. The approach worked bottom-up, from an understanding of what parameters to use, to how these parameters defined the space of the tower, and then using the diagrid to articulate that space. Each time the articulation is a result of an interaction between parameters and the distribution of space. I will continue to use the diagrid. Its flexibility allows infinite possibilities and my hope is to also begin to work with it in terms of structural optimization which will add another level of feedback into the projects.
We have finished work on the Taiwan Tower competition. The winner for the this competition is Dorin Stefan. In general the results were a bit crazier than what we proposed.
The project was based on overlapping layers of a diagrid geometric pattern, created by rotating a fat triangle.
The overlapping rotation created opportunities for different floor configurations that accommodate the various programs. The facade is a smaller scale diagrid which reacts to both the external environment and internal program.
I think the strength of our proposal was the simple set up which through multiple simultaneous iterations creates a complexity that is still very readable.
I worked on this project with Diego Ricalde and his partners at MMX. I want to thank them for adding their talent, and I think that while we did not get the prize we produced a great proposal.
