Ligações Urbanas Installation in Curitiba

Permanent installation commissioned to Atelier UM+D by the department of tourism of the City of Curitiba, for the information service center at Rua 24 Horas, completed in November 2011. To cite our release:

The urban depth emerges physically and sensitively in different manners, in an arrange specific to the user and to the multiple relations made possible by the city, inside a connectivity between the parts and the whole. Distinct components link forming an interlocked arrangement structurally specific to the site.

It was an excellent opportunity to investigate generative systems of lightweight structures and complex connections. We start from a Delaunay triangulation of a pseudo-random network differentially extruded following a set of attractor curves and we extend the connecting nodes’ geometry to stabilize the structural parts in the direction perpendicular thereto. This extension changed the secondary status of the connectors, turning them the main pieces. The whole parametric process consists of five Grasshopper definitions and one RhinoScript separated in stages to allow team work. As a result, 540 unique pieces of polystyrene were CNC cut and assembled with screws.

Author: Atelier UM+D
Team: Gustavo Utrabo, Juliano Monteiro, Pedro Duschenes, Ernesto Bueno, Lucas Issey and Marcela Furtado.
Year: 2011.
Location: Rua 24 Horas, Curitiba, Brazil.
Status: Built.

More images on the Atelier UM+D website.

Radiolarian Pavilion IJAC article is online

Radiolarian Egg Pavilion

This is my contribution, done on March for an ongoing research project for a pavilion to hold a sculpture at the Barcelona campus of UIC, where the ESARQ is.

Like the other Radiolarian project, it’s conceived and directed by Alberto T. Estevez, head of the Genetic Architectures research line. It consists of an ovoid-shaped structure also designed as an interpretation of bone structures of Radiolarians. Its design develops a series of irregular hexagonal cells that are repeated in a tessellation of a surface and generate volumes that, following the logic of bone structures, are thickened at nodes forming spikes and leaving rounded holes.

The non-standard geometry outcomes from programming and modeling methods using RhinoScript and the Rhino3DE’s Math Plug-in.

Phyllotaxis Tower

This is an idea for a skyscraper based on spiral phyllotaxis, like the sunflower system, that exhibits spiral pods always in Fibonacci numbers.

'Ocurt' assignments: undergraduate advice at ESARQ

During academic year 2008-2009, Professor Antonio Sanmartín and T.A. Marc Camallonga invited me to do an advice in their last year Architectural Projects class, in the undergraduate program at ESARQ – UIC.

Although they don’t consider themselves up to date in matters of digital technologies in architecture, they have a very interesting approach to encourage students to design algorithmically and, by doing so, evolving beyond XX^th century. They begin by studying parameters to create variables from site and context, and also from a very different income: literature. They chose a novel and distributed it, one chapter per student, to generate a diagram from it (in the very Eisenman style!).

My contribution began doing a short lecture on algorithmic design and giving what they called the ‘Ocurt’ assignment: to take the diagram and site variables and develop a complex surface out of them by an algorithmic strategy. Remembering Karl Chu’s reconsideration of Eisenman, I taught them a strategy of synthesizing data and mapping it on a base shape, based on Chu’s morphogenetic approach that he teaches in the Master by an analogic algorithmic strategy (without programming).

In a more advanced stage, I was called for a second 'Ocurt' assignment: a digital fabrication plan. After suggesting some reference reading on the subject, a CAD/CAM strategy was applied to the developed architectural element, so that it could be fabricated in the CNC machine of the school. Some cases required basic training in rationalization of complex surfaces with PanelingTools.

The image shows some student projects at different stages. Photos by Marc Camallonga.

Thanks to Alberto T. Estévez for recommending me to Antonio Sanmartín for this class.

Considerations and Resources for the Conception of Form in the Architecture of the Digital Age

An essay that claims for the generation and representation of form in architecture, taking into consideration theoretical basements recently reviewed in terms of topology in architecture and one of its modeling resources, the NURBS. A background to the current generative techniques is presented, from manual computation to interpreted programming languages, like RhinoScript, from which it’s shown a stub on the state-of-the-art within this area in architectural design in both professional and academic levels, especially in the Ibero-american region. These demonstrate what resources that have the designers, who are showing a new form of sensitivity in the architecture of the digital age.

Article published in Spanish, in the Brazilian academic magazine PARC - Pesquisa em arquitetura e construção, vol. 1, n. 3. November, 2008.

You can download the original article in PDF from PARC’s site. I’m looking forward to translate it to English and Portuguese, but my web publishing process is on hold.