Saturday, February 28, 2009

Two proposals.....What's best?!

In both cases the focus of the proposals do not really lie in the spatial quality of the pavilion, but, for this course, more in the structural beauty of a built object. The result will not be a fully designed pavilion. But rather a structural object testing if my hypothesis is correct. Stating that:
1) the in approximitely 600 milion years evoluated natural forms/structures are enough to achieve pure beauty in an architectural context.
2) these by nature evoluated structures are able, after adjusting them with respect to other force impacts, to function with the same level of efficiency in architectural circumstances.

Proposal One
- focus: STRUCTURAL SKIN


- magnify the rad. web structure so that it would be big enough to become a pavilion.
- add additional support elements in order to keep the pavilion standing. (inspire the shape on other rad. skeleton types)
- Fix these additional support element(s) as a boundary condition.
- try optimizing the rad. tesselation in order to achieve a structural skin (gc diana loop)
- the topology of the structural skin would be the input from the radiolarian side of research, while the additional support would be one of the architectural inputs.

Proposal Two - focus: MAIN LOAD BEARING STRUCTURE



- build the main structure based on rad. in gc
- test loop with diana to adjust the structure for building environment
- then add the tesselation. and optimize on the field of: using the least amount of material.

1 comment:

  1. Hi Maria,
    I am not sure I fully got the difference between the two proposals. If I right understood, the first works with structural skins (what is it in your architectural idea?) the second with beams + single layer grid (primary + secondary structures).

    I do believe choice between the two ideas would be helped by making a previous choice on the architecture/pavilion you are interested in. Vertical supports can be achieved either by your skin coming down to touch the ground (example: fluid shape) or adding elements extraneous to your skin-grid. If you want to work within this second case, you could start by combining a regular grid (even a small number) of vertical elements and your radiolarian like grid structure. Connection nodes are critical point – also in terms of integrating vertical elements and roof shape (to avoid the effect of a skin supported by columns). This might lead new rules in deforming your radiolarian-like structure. I would see this option more oriented to exploring a roof structure (even not large span). If you want to work on the first case (no columns), then I do not see too much difference between proposal 1 and 2 – till we do not better clarify the idea of structural skin/grid. Pavilion is ok and it might be even small enough to avoid vertical supports other than its structural skin.

    I believe both your proposals have potentials as well as need to be better addressed. But only when starting working on modeling/sketches and first geometries it is possible to do it. Sometime doubts are being solved while doing/trying/designing/modeling - without the need of having a very definitive plan before starting. And having early models and sketches done is also quite important for discussing. Therefore once more the recommendation of trying – start modeling.

    Michela

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