Gene Lab

One of these days, I found myself approaching a Lab project. Some time in the past I worked in interior Lab design, the projects are complex, packed with regulations, but at the same time challenging and full of excitement.
Needless to say that greater the client's budget... greater the excitement, and pretty sleek results can be obtained...

Anyway I ended up (for kicks), creating a shell for a gene lab / university (space port) like sleek building. The idea was to create a animated facade (pretty baroque) formally inspired in crystal structures, that would work with a inner hull to accommodate several technical spaces and equipment.

The modeling technique, passed by the obvious subdivide methods, followed by a light fractal extrusion and followed by a random extrusion. Most of the times you may have to code this, but I'm pretty lazy so I used blender that provide those same tools out of the box.
I'm not going trough the hole project study, I just let you the test images of the crazy facade.

Biotope

Another short formal essay. Aiming the construction of coral-like building, working as a biotope.
Shade, light, temperature, humidity control. The building would regulate this factors like a living organism, the same with all other functions, waters and energy.

It explores the notion of porous space, the relation between "bubbles", and the hybridization of staying places and passage spaces, and the duality between mass and subtraction/retraction.
still.... loads of thinking to do in this one.....

Twitter

My new twitter account. I've noticed that twitter can be used for sharing relevant information, like resource sites and more.

So I'm sharing pieces of information that I found useful for designers. Themes are (most of the time) Architecture, Industrial, graphic design specific, software / hardware related and tutorials. The objective is sharing really useful information, without being much of a nag.

You can find there, great zines like archdaily or yanko, and great studios like Various architects and more.

Naturally you can find me there under the name: pguerreiro

Grasshopper(ing)

Component Generation using Grasshopper surface box and box morph.

I got inspired by Andre's exquisite Grasshopper rumblings (thanks for the great tips), So I finally spared a couple of hours to play with it. And... it's the second best invention after the wheel. (no joke).. I wish I had time to take a deep dive into it. Still, here is the result, I followed a basic but brilliant tutorial done by Zach (Kudos!!), pretty soon I will be testing my own definitions.

Skinning steel

A small experiment (yet to be deeply developed), aims to the re-use of steel structures in urban niches.

Re framed Steel structures, that grows between, under or above urban existences. Skinned with a polymeric membrane, acts simultaneously as a roof, facade, floor. Subverts the notion of interior and exterior. Creates (sometimes) shade, shelter and visually frames part of the urban view without enclosure.

In this hybrid environment, equates the possibility of creating an independent support system for various programmatic purposes. I can imagine some sort of market, Chinatown, commercial and passage way, blade runner style.

The images for now are not that elaborate though, and refer mostly to the framing.

Keywords: anisotropy, deform, distortion, endemic, field space, flexible, hybrid program, in-between, interference, motion, polymer, polymorphic, skin, sustainability, systemic, urban

Ribs

A small incursion on ribbing, easy enough as an experiment, but here is the result.

Just some curves, a loft and surface.
Give the surface some thickness, duplicating it and create the lateral surfaces (_EdgeSrf), join all surfaces in a closed polysurface creating a solid.
Create the contours in y and x direction (Contour command, with join curves by contour plane option)
Then after obtaining the ribbing, load the ribs script. I've used the script by Un Didi, Kudos to him. And I must also thank Rodrigo Medina and Andre for the pointers.

So I'm still yet to test a unroll script, let's see if I find some time to do that... pointers are always welcome.

Design methodology

No project is the same, in architecture in particular that means that my methodology tends to assume some kind of "dynamic existence".
Meaning that the relevance of the initial premises changes greatly, leading to quite different approaches and developments.

This "core premises" for me are:

Concept | idea, character, shape, poetics, etc., restless, dynamic and abstract nature.

Territory | morphology, views, patterns, materials, geography, memory, etc., less abstract, cognitive and emotional in nature.

Program | logic, function, safety, rules, etc, down to earth, rational, logic in nature.

This means that some projects have a strong conceptual drive. These kinds tend to be more autistic and self justified.

Others, the second kind, are sensible to the territory usually gaining an endemic nature, becoming themselves part of it.

Others yet, are program motivated by the program, build to perform.

To these extreme examples I often call characters.

Of course, few are “pure characters” from start to finish, in most of the cases all these aspects need to be weaved somehow. Still, I think there must be a predominant one, a ruler that sets the development dynamics. It will be the generative DNA of the project.

From here a storyboard can be produced, using key frames to mark essential parts of the project. All of them generated from the initial DNA and containing the very same character. In the end both diversity and oneness is attained.

I'm drifting a bit... So, the great thing about being an architect is the ability to dose these aspects with sensibility and art.

Fun with attractors

Chaos is fun! Far from the randomness disorder concept nature proves it's existence trough intelligent and complex mathematics. I used Chaoscope to experiment with attractors, and I ended up with this gorgeous looking images as a bonus.

Testing Organic forms

A small incursion into hypernurbs and matrix extrusion. No code.
My next step will be (probably) voronoy and L-systems, (Qhull and Rhino..)
Good tips are welcome.

The discover

In the last week, I found a few amazing blogs, all of them packed with absolutely brilliant and inspiring work.
Simultaneously, I perceived that the questions and topics that I had in my mind for quite some time, were well known by these guys.

It was quite a find. So I began exploring a few theoretic issues inside the complex geometry theme, generative processes and scripting.

I first looked into MEL, but I don't have much time right now, and I had to dig quite a bit into Maya. Then I thought that Rhino would be a great way to go, since I'm a bit familiar with it.
Right now I'm digging into rhinoscript 101, and I will be posting a few tests and thoughts along the way. I will also cover architectural issues of different sort.

I'm also keeping an eye on the grasshopper plugin....

So, here are some really simple tests. Hopefully I will grow into more comples geometries..
Rhino geometry, basic honeycomb, pipes and array. Render in cinema 4d (no GI).

Thoughts, helping hands and tips are welcome.