Surface Relaxation in Rhino

A small script has now been made that takes all the coordinates from our test models (stored in an excel sheet) and from these creates points, lines, and number id.'s in Rhino. Taken advantage of an available Surface Relaxation script made for Rhino the physical test models can now easily be digitized and thereafter further explored and manipulated.

06_Triangle Cuts

05_Cone Assembly

04_Twisting Stribs

03_Tubes

02_Cone Scorpion

01_Four Saddles

We have decided to base our material systems approach on tensile membrane structures. Therefore we have constructed a perspex box and iniated what is going to be an extensive series of tests where we will search for and examine inherent geometric behaviors as well as the potential that occurs in different setups of tensile membranes.

Starting out with some basic shapes we began with saddle shapes.

What are we fiddling with?!?

In the beginning of february we (Henrik and myself) clapped the clapperboard and jumped into the frightening free-fall experience of writing a thesis project. Although we still seem to be spinning around ourself so rapidly that the world is perceived as one obscure blur, we have managed to box in an objective for our project.

The central aim of the thesis project is the development of a material system containing a high degree of integration between its design and its performance. The project will develop a system that is able to adapt to varied performance requirements through the modulation of the system’s inherent geometric and material parameters while remaining within the limits of chosen production technologies. In this synergetic relationship, the factors: unpredictable, implausible, and unknown will not be seen as factors of fear but rather invi­tations for exploration.

The goal for the project is to use the power of computation, involving vast quantities of calculations, combinatorial analysis, randomness, or recursion, to name a few, as ‘idea-generators’ that can point out new ‘thought’ processes that might never have occurred in the human mind, thereby expanding the limits of human imagination.

Although the material system, during its development phase, will be generated and motivated to grow and evolve in a context less space, the aim is to implement the system in an urban environment where it in an intelligent, complex and highly performative way will adapt to specific site parameters and values.

The aim is to generate an installation that is to be situated in an urban space where it should be capable of responding to the immediate context and the dynamics of the urban life adding new spatial configurations and environments. As this project is very concerned with the coherency between the logics of material, production and assembly it will aim for the production of a 1:1 prototype, depending on the size of the installation either a full size or a relevant part, so as to validate the process and secure that actual production is coherent with the parameters of the material system.

Since this project is of an experimental character documentation of the process is a very important factor. Recurring cycles of analysis and evaluation will ensure a continuous adding of new parameters or optimization if you like, of the system and here rapid prototyping plays an important role enabling an interchange between digital test and analog material dependent models. This ensures a coherency within the material system.