S6 Designing Agency | Master in Advanced Architecture 2012/2013

ARCHITECTURE BY NATURE | Chamma Nasr – Raju V.K. Alluri – Narula Priyanka – A.1

Here you can find the first assignment’s video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Qn01H95EX4

OPTIMIZED PHYLLOTAXIS

By studying the plants elements and how it stands depending on its middle core, the main concept was about generating this natural parameters and conditions like a rule to desing buildings as a tree.

BUILDING AS A TREE: After drawing an envelop that contain the legal possible areas, we started generating the structural morphology of the building by using the natural parameters.

BEIRUT, LEBANON [BE] | Maximize Solar Radiations

Every region in a city it has it’s own variable natural conditions like the wind direction, solar radiations, topography, etc and the external parameters that it’s related to location and the surrounded enviroment.The first optimized site is in the capital of Lebanon Beirut,

The weather in Lebanon is defined as moderate with annaul temperature range between 10 and 30 degrees.
By using the circles that we got after adding the natural concept in a Grasshopper definition it gave us many generations of envelop formations till if found the best shape depending on the solar radiations optimization through Galapagos.

The quantity of solid and void in the tower is a result because of the final radiuses and positions of the natural surrounded circles that it was serching about the best shape for getting the maximum solar radiations.

MUMBAI, INDIA [IN] | Minimize Solar Radiations

As same as before, the second optimized site was in Mumbai, India to see how changing the site can create radical changes with the design parameters because of the different natural conditions. The weather in Mumbai is defined as hot with annaul temperature range between 24 and 40 degrees.

Whenever there’s a bigger quantity of solar radtiations, the void area in the building envelop it became larger.

VALLDUARA, SPAIN [VA] | Maximize Solar Radiations

The third optimized site is tottaly different than the first two and its more related to montains and nature out of cities.

The tree’s density and the topography status was our main parameters that we can use to get the highet range of solar radiations, using the highest point in the site and the surrounded trees as a structure for the building.

A STRUCTURE BY NATURE:
After choosing the site and studying all the parameters around, we start generating a structure that could serve a specific function for this location, in time all the structure envelop and all the sides are from fiber sheets that contain different parametric openings facing the orientation, wind direction and the sun radiations.

Depending on the fiber prototypes experiments and the reaction mapping, we can generate the different exact formations for every side in the envelop to be playing the best interactive function, reacting with nature.

Second step: generating the points is a 3 Axes choice related directly to be respecting and melting with the natural parameters around like topography, trees etc. The weather in Valldaura is defined as cold with annaul temperature range between 10 and 20 degrees.

After generating some fixed points on ground depending on given area for a specific function, we connected the upper points to the trees projected grid so our volume can get optimized and give the best angles and areas for the top and sides of the envelop.

POTENTIAL ARCHITECTURE

We chose Fargo, Barcelona and Beirut.
Specially Fargo,North Dakota for its cold weather all year long.We set up the building
rotation and height for our genome.Moreover we included a segmented line in the
equation that Galapagos was controlling to cull outcertain parts of the building in order
to achieve highest radiation levels on the building facade. We included a culling
out of some units in the bottom of the building with high shadowing values from surrounding
buildings as well.For Barcelona we decided to add higher obstructing structures surrounding
the building. We also included buidling rotation and height into the genome or the solver.
We set the solver to minimize radiation on the building envelope, and the solution it
optimized wasmostly overshadowed by the surrounding structures.
In the solver set up for Beiut, we obtained an atrium in the center of the building oriented
away from the direction of thesun, thus reducing overall radiation on the building and acting
as a vent leading hot air out of the building core. We also decided to reduce the ammount of
builtup area in places with limited view of the surrounding alternately raising the quality
of the areas that are constructed.