My close friends left for Japan this morning. They are going to take a semester @Seika University in Kyoto. They seemed pretty nervous, but I would rather take off than seeing someone off.
Left) Sky with his precious bike. Right) Sareen and Barbara, well-equipped for their five-month-long Mt. Everest climbing.
Sareen, Barbara, Sky, and Will are in Kyoto, Harold is in Paris, Roxanne in New York, and Dylan in Boston. New phase of our lives.
3/24 (Sat) was 1:2 charrette. Two representatives of each architecture /design school of southern California compete for $10,000 scholarship. No computer is allowed!
I dropped by for dinner and presentation. Evening air was filled with relief and tension of competitors. More and more architects only uses computer for their presentation and drawings. If it wasn't for this well-funded annual charrette, students would forget what is important for design and communication. I'm not talking about analogue is good and digital is bad. Only using computers, sometimes I just feel the discontinuity between input and output through my brain. I really appreciate sponsors of 1:2 competition for making young students work butt off, and grant them with scholarship.
David and I just finished studio Midterm. The potential of 150sqft. We proposed the dwelling that embed living machine as a system to support a person to live self-sustaining life in a city. Plants (exterior) and Moss (Interior) cover the unit to maintain comfortable micro climate. The unit also carries the Hydroponic garden. Each unit is designed to fit into the different conditions of the site: Alley, Rooftop, and Side.
Alley Condition and Rooftop Condition are independent units to which an inhabitant doesn't have access from inside of existing building.
Side Condition is accessible from existing building through the windows. This proposal seemed to be the most appealing to juries, since it has a potential to be a backyard for city living. While Alley and Rooftop Condition are parasite to the existing buildings in terms of additional load of structure and extended pluming, the Side one does have benefit to the room that the unit is connected.
We are going to develop this scheme further as: Air filter, Sound Screen, Curtain, Hydroponic Garden, Floating Backyard, Graywater Recycling System.
I'm working on Dragonfly wing Installation for Tom Wiscombe + Buro Happold. Basically, it's a gigantic voronoi cantilever constructed with folded aluminum panels. If you see the final installation only, you might think it of another crazy sculpture.
The fun part is the process not the result itself. Setting up the geometry in CATIA allows us to run structural optimization. The parameters are "curvature of entire sculpture," "width of each voronai wall," and "size of each voronai cell."
"overall geometry," "number of voronoi," "material," and "points of cantilever" do not change. Computer doesn't solve everything with one click. It's all about how to setup the geometry. Without setting it up properly, without knowing the result we want, computer cannot think for us.
Here are some iterations of origami surfaces. The challenge was (except the manual powerCopying...) how to set up spikes NORMAL to the surface. Basically, those are done by manipulating sin curve functions (to control the curvature of surfaces). Deformation nodes are the followings.
-the span of sin curve -number of waves -repetition of waves -height of the creases -acceleration of curvature angle (by law)
By the way, I think FoG stands for Function of Graph. Better guess than Frank OGehry...
Another pattern generation. It's from Yokohama Port Terminal by FOA.
一枚目の写真は横浜の大桟橋です。彼らが何のソフトを使って建設のプロセスを簡略化したのかはわかりませんが、私は Digital Project で真似してみました。このソフトは“どんな形にしようかな～”と色々試してみるには使いにくいものですが、いったんカタチが決まってしまえば構造計算も部品発注もまとめて面倒見てくれます。
