For this exercise we decided to use our newly obtained skills with Galapagos on our final studio concept. The idea is to create a completely passive shading system that provides coverage wherever its needed in let the sun rays pass wherever they are desired.The blocking/passing of sun rays will be controlled passively by the outside temperature itself.

Embedding photochromic paint into a transparent stretchable material will allow us to have small “skin” elements attached on a frame. Those elements will get dark as soon as sun rays touch them.

Attaching those elements with flexinol strings to the frame will allow those elements to starch and expand providing shade to a grater surface. The flexinol strings will act as contracting muscles who decrease their length and so will act on the photochrimic elements forcing a change. Flexinol strings react to temperature witch in our case will passively be provided by the sun. In other words the strings exposed to the straight heavy sunlight will get hotter faster than the others and will start shrinking at that specific spot before any other strings in the system. Only the elements exposed to direct sunlight however will get dark and opaque providing shade only to the area needing it.

For our optimization we chose as a Fitness criteria  the minimum sun exposure on the surface of the building, with the minimum surface of the skin components. In other words we wanted to know how to provide the best shading with the minimal amount of materials needed.

In the Grasshopper definition it is plane visible that everything is related to the sun and its position in specific days. Thanks to GH the construction can proceed.

1. Secondary supportive structure                           2. Supportive structure                                     3. Shading system

The secondary supporting structure is mounted on the building, than the supporting structure is build on that, and finally the shading elements are being mounted on their places.

Here are examples of how our shading system will look during day and night time. During the day the photochromic paint will get active from the UV light and show its color. Without light the semi transparent material where the paint is embedded will reflect the city lights.

References from Google images :

http://www.ictblog.it/index.php?/archives/3073-Straordinario!-Il-muscolo-elettronico.-Flexinol..html

http://www.vivimedlabs.com/vivimed-products/reversacol-photochromic-dyes/reversacol-applications

On my way happily crossing Poblenou…

This self tracking File was recorded on 24.02.2014 with “GPS Kit Free” IOS application. I call it “A trip to the Beach”

The colors of the spheres show the speed ratio from green – slow to red – fast.

The diameter of the sphere indicates the distance where the speed showed by the color was exacted.The white tube represents the the gaps where the GPS system failed to receive data from the satellite.

The movement on the beach shows a boy playing with a Frisbee.

This self tracking File was recorded on 19.02.2014 with “GPS Kit Free” IOS application. I call it “A trip to the MatterFab”

The colors of the tube show the speed ratio from green – slow to red – fast, as well as the distance in witch this speed was exacted.The white tube represents the the gaps where the GPS system failed to receive data from the satellite.The chaotic movement at the top of the map shows two people having no clue about their whereabouts or the position of their goal.

Reference links:
Google Earth

The Data collected and mapped is unfortunately not connected to any of my projects at the time, having in mind that all are far away from real architecture and functions for now.
So being a European from a country (Bulgaria) that just has recently joined the Union, I decided to pick a topic related with the other candidates applying for membership.

Reference links:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:EU27-candidate_countries_map.svg

So I found myself an excel table, cleaned it up deleting the unnecessary information so Grasshopper can read the  file easily, than saved it into a “comma separated file”.

Reference links:

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/download.do?tab=table&plugin=1&language=en&pcode=tgs00027

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/population/data/main_tables

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/tgm/table.do?tab=table&init=1&language=en&pcode=tgs00027&plugin=1

My skills proved not to be enough for getting a % ratio of the population growth, or compress the definition to something better than a huge copy + paste monster.

However the mapping result is still kind of awesome.