… play with Surface Evolver, TopMod + Rhinoscript…

I’ve been spending too much time teaching and working for other people.  Tonight I finally sat down and started to play with a few things that have been running in my head for the last few weeks, stuff that is related in parts to the work I’ve been doing both at the office and at uni.  These are a few tests (warm up stretches   using Surface Evolver, some remeshing in TopMod, then a touch of Rhinoscript.

Schoen's Manta Genus 19 on Schoen's Manta Genus 19

earlier script version, mistakes at edges

Close, still no cigar...

To be Continued...

The Living Tower is a proposal for a new kind of living in the Melbourne CBD, one which proactively engages inhabitants to imagine and change for a better future.  Embracing a concept where ‘sustainable’ is not enough, architecture becomes a catalyst for giving back to the urban and natural environments.  Wind, water, solar, and geothermal resources are harvested not only to create better living environments, but to generate algae production, generating energy for the building and back into the power grid.

Sustaining current urban tower practices is no longer an option. We must proactively engage users to imagine and change for a better ecological future. The projection of rapid prototyping technologies allows us to imagine a new kind of urban tower – one which lives and breathes to provide life and inspiration to its inhabitants.

Conceived as a living Klein bottle, with a continuous skin folding from the inside to out, a street level bio-cube harnesses the cooling effect of a temperate mirco-climate, passively controlling the climate within the tower.  Above the bio-cube, pods are inserted into the bottle skin, organised through a recursive aperiodic tessellation. An algorithm for growth and decay, with mathematical properties related to phi, the tessellation creates distinct spatial properties, as well as a strong organic quality to the architecture.

Sustainability as we know it asks for minimal damage to the environment during construction and inhabitation. Future technologies will allow us to fabricate servicing into non linear structural walls.  Mass customization will allow form to be liberated to work with the natural flows of the elements around us.  We are able to imagine an architecture which not only utilizes the natural flows of our changing climate, but attempts to negate the affects of carbon emissions by producing algae based biofuel as a parasite to its own climate control system.  A temperate micro-climate, passive lighting and cooling systems, recyclable components, waste recycling, food and biofuel growth systems, creates an adaptable, ecologically innovative tower of the future.

Beyond the Dreams of Avarice seeks greater meaning in architecture as a reflection of current society, one that is, paradoxically, highly connected yet confused and troubled.  A proposal for a financial centre in Melbourne, the design process evolved through extensive reading and exploration of several key themes – the unstable, endogenous nature of the financial system; emergent processes; the tower typology in buildings of commerce; and the application of computational design processes to tease out highly abstract concepts into physical form and spatial experience.

The project considers the economic cycle as a reflection of people’s tendency to veer from euphoria to depression, and draws design ideas from notions of unease.  It rejects architectural symbols of power and top-down organizational structures.  Instead, the project considers the wisdom of crowds as an alternative model, using bottom-up emergent processes – driven by a combination of tangible architectural parameters as well as intangible qualities – to generate form and space.

view the project panels and reference folio on Issuu:

Presentation Panels: http://issuu.com/jessin/docs/mp_panels

Reference Folio: http://issuu.com/jessin/docs/majorproject_reference

Always good fun trying to name a project 10 min before you’re due to submit catalogue images.  Been throwing around different names, trying to come up with something that would nicely round up ‘instability’, ‘pandemonium’, ‘euphoric–depressive’, and ‘greed sucks’.  I gave up, and just stole a well known phrase, ‘Beyond the Dreams of Avarice’.

Here’s the crappy blurb that’s going into the catalogue.  Hopefully it’s vague enough to give me space to move:

Buildings designed to house and stand for institutions of finance have tended to portray notions of stability, order, growth and power.  the unstable and cyclic nature of economics is rarely acknowledged, even though these qualities are an inherent part of the financial system to which these buildings owe their existence.  Beyond the Dreams of Avarice is a proposal for a financial centre in the melbourne cbd that has come about from an exploration of several themes – the unstable, endogenous nature of the financial system; the psychology of debt and the wisdom of crowds; the tower typology in buildings of commerce; and the application of computational design processes to tease out highly abstract concepts into physical form and spatial experience.