Clouds by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec

French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec have designed a           modular room-dividing system called Clouds for textile                       manufacturers Kvadrat.Clouds consists of textile pieces held together with elastic bands to make free-standing or hanging structures, which can be used to divide space and absorb sound.

“The world around us is becoming increasingly immaterial. We are now used to write emails instead of letters, to pay online, to download music and touch virtual buttons on touch screens. We live in a society of images, a visual culture full of colours, advertisements, television and the internet. There is not much left to feel. Giving importance to surfaces that are desirable to touch can reconnect us with the material world and enhance the emotional value of an object.
“Wooden Textiles” convey a new tactile experience. We are used to experience wood as a hard material, we know the feeling of walking across wooden floors, to touch a wooden tabletop or to feel the bark of a tree. But we usually don’t experience a wooden surface which can be manipulated by touch.”Elisa Strozyk

The (X) house is designed to address the extreme changes in temperature that the region faces throughout the year.The project’s name refers to the funnels found within the house which channel sunlight and air from the outside in. The architects were interested in “designing the conditions as opposed to conditioning the design”, and thus sought to incorporate as many passive systems as possible. The “black lung” absorbs heat during the day and shelters the interior spaces, while the surface of the “white lung” captures and bathes the internal terraces in light. By providing a sheltered, controlled and well illuminated environment, Multiplicities hopes that they can provide a system that can adapt to the environment of Inner Mongolia. (images and information by http://www.inhabitat.com/architecture)

This Chamber Music Hall designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. The design process involved architectural considerations of scale, structure and acoustics to realize a dynamic formal dialogue inseparable from its intended purpose as an intimate chamber music hall. A layering of spaces and functions is achieved through the ribbon wrapping around itself, alternately compressing to the size of a handrail then stretching to enclose the full height of the room. Circulatory and visual connections are continually discovered as one passes through the multiple layers of space delineated by the ribbon.

The ribbon itself consists of a translucent fabric membrane articulated by an internal steel structure suspended from the ceiling. The surface of the fabric shell undulates in a constant but changing rhythm as it is stretched over the internal structure. (images and information by http://www.architeria.com/)

Beige Architecture, in collaboration with Proces2, covered the AirSpace Tokyo with a layer of artificial vegetation.The building, located in the Kitamagome Ota-ku district, is a four story multi-family dwelling unit with professional photography studios.The exterior building skin is conceived as a thin interstitial environment, which articulated densities of the porous and open-celled meshwork are layered in response to the inner workings of the building’s program. (images and information by http://coolboom.net/)

There are two ideas, based on structural thinking, one for a floor that swelled up to support a flat roof; the    other for a flat roof composed exclusively of random cross lines and supported only by the line of the exterior  walls, in all forming an absolute box. They went for the second idea, where Cecil Balmond found a simple  algorithm for getting the seemingly chaotic pattern of lines. “Propose an algorithm: half to a third of adjacent  sides of the

Case study # 1 “Prada Epicenter”, by Herzon & de Meuron

An unconventional and attractive feature in Tokyo’s prestigious Aoyama district, Herzon & de Meuron’s “Prada Epicenter” store is sheeted on a façade that works both as a decorative element and as the structural support of the entire construction’s six floors, where stairs and rooms morph seemingly out of the skin composed of diamond shaped units.

This skin, all around the building’s five façades, is also seen as an interactive element due the shape of the various windows around it, which vary from green and bluish colors to flat, convex and concave shapes, creating an illusion of movement along the building.

These diamond units are aggregated on one another to form a solid structural shell. This system is quite convenient since it creates resistance based on a single unit that can be repeated to the Nth power, plus it is also quite easy to keep track of the individual pieces during the fabrication process, unlike other similar buildings where each individual piece  is created around different dimensions.

Case study # 2 “Pavilion at Serpentine Gallery”, by Toyo Ito

Built to stand for just three months on the lawn of the Serpentine Gallery, at Hide Park in London, the Pavilion is a light construction made out aluminum plates. These plates are all of irregular patterns, being a sharp contrast to Herzog & de Meuron’s orderly grid. These irregular patterns form the basic, compact, structure of the pavilion.

The process can be seen as the extraction of material off a solid volume where a mathematically generated grid or map was overlaid, forming a pattern of patches. These patches then can be chosen to either remain within the solid or being extracted.

In the end what is obtained is a cubic body understood as being made out of an agglutination of different  shapes that together form the sole structural support. It does becomes a holistic object.