ARCHITECTURE DESIGN STUDIO

AIRDESIGN APPROACHMONUMENTAL--- Grids and Lattices

SemesterKailing WangStudent No. 514464

PART B

DESIGN APPROACH

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B1. DESIGN FOCUSIn this section of the journal, the combination of the case studies were exploded to explain our initial design ideas and design approach.

There are variety of material systems that we can choose and then develop our design ideas step by step. Our group’s topic is the monumental and we chose the grid and lattice as our material system and at the first stage we focused on the repetation of the basic geome-try, which we found was a very interesting topic. According to the analysis of the precedents, we found that we cannot explore our design idea well if we only focus on one prece-dent. This allowed us to focus on different perspectives to find the most relevant one to our design approach.

As a result, in this stage, the analysis of the case studies gave us a strong understanding of the parametric modelling and the grasshopper plugin.

According to the brierf of the project, we need to design a gateway sculpture beside the highway to the Wyndham City.In my opinion, this gateway sculpture should provide a unique feeling to people when they traveling to the Wyndham City. Therefore, our group wants to design a sculpture that illus-trate the speed and the power of the highway.

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B2. CASE STUDY 1.0-- LUNCH BOX

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DESIGN IDEAThe design focus of our project is to illustrate the power and the speed of the highway. The idea of power is related to the monumental, which provides a unique feeling to people. Because our topic is monumen-tal, our sculpture should be very strong and powerful to provide a unforgettable feeling to peo-ple.

The picture on the right is a sculpture, which was designed by the Heatherwick Studio. This sculpture was exploded from the central point and become sharper and sharper along each strip. It uses the repetation of the strips to form an exploded shpae to illustrate the power of the explosion.

The second idea of our design approach is about the flying path of the swarm. This natural process can illustrate the speed of the flying and to use this nat-ural process in our desing can

represent the high speed of the car on the highway.

Therefore, we need to find a geometry that exploded from the central point and then re-peated the geometry along the flying path of the swarm. The fol-lowing case studies will help us to find the best way to realized this initial design idea.

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SCULPTUREHEATHERWICK STUDIO

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B3. CASE STUDY 2.0THE SWARM

THE SWARM is a parametrical sculpture project, which de-veloped its form from the flying flock of the birds. It repeated 211 individual triangular geom-etries. As a result, it showed the density, light and shadow of the sculpture together in one project. The curve of the sculp-ture shows the dynamic path of the flying flock of birds, which moves upwards to the sky from the ground. We chose this proj-ect as our inspiration precedent because it is quite similar to our design idea--- speed, and each

single element of the project represent a bird in the flying process.

In addition, the geometry of the “bird” is the triangular shape that exploded from a point to three direction to form this “bird” form. The material and the exploded triangular geome-try illustrate our idea of powerful and explosion.

In the next stage, we try to reverse back of the project to digitize this sculpture with

the grasshopper in Rhino. Firstly, we designed our triangular geometry and then set a curve in grasshopper to align these elements as a dynamic form. Finally, we grouped these ele-ments to realize the sculpture in grasshopper.

RESOURCEShttp://www.grasshopper3d.com/profile/WielandSchmidt

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B3. CASE STUDY 2.1CANTON TOWER

In the next stage, we need to consider the method to realize the pathway of the bird flying. We dicided to use the grid to support the structure of the dynamic form, which represents the flying path of the bird. Therefore, we use Canton Tower as a precedent to find the best structure of our design.

The Canton Tower is a building that was designed by Informa-tion Based Architects with a twist structure. It is a good ex-ample of structure and form to support the twist, dynamic form of the flying pathway.

Then we try to create the dig-ital model with grasshopper. Through the parametric design process, two ellipses are joined together in a twisting motion, which was rotated around the central point. Then, we created the grid using divided curve command in grasshopper and ratated it in using the slider command.

The reverse engineering pro-cesses of the Canton Tower is very important, because the twist structure of it inspired us a lot about the structure to sup-port the dynamic form of the

flying pathway of the birds. In the futher stages of design process, we need to make an effort to change the form of the model using the parameters in grasshopper to find the most suitable design technique of the Gateway sculpture to Wyhdam City.

RESOURCES

Architects: Information Based Architects

http://www.archdaily.com/89849/canton-tower-information-based-architecture/

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CANTON TOWERARCHITECTS:INFORMATION BASED ARCHITECTS

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B4. DESIGN TECHNIQUEMATRIX

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B4. DESIGN TECHNIQUESURFACE OF THE SELECTED CURVES

After changing the variables of the structure, we chose four rotation degrees and three groups of dividing points to loft twelve twisting surfaces to find the most suitable one of the flying pathway.

To decide the best form, we considered the direction of the motion of the birds. We found that the sparial form is the most interesting way of flying. There-fore, the four surfaces with only one dividing point cannot illus-trate the dynamic form of the bird flying.

However, if we want to add the grid structure on the sparial sur-face, to realize it as a physical model, the form cannot rotate too much because it would be difficult to convert to the grid

structure. After considering all these twelve surfaces, we chose the four surfaces with two divid-ing points for the further design technique testing. In the further stage, we would try to convert the surface to the grid structure to find the best one that related to our design ideas.

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B5. TECHNIQUE PROTOTYPE

RESOURCES

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