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

Being all students at IaaC, it is no surprise that many of us share very similar living patterns including the ways in which we move around in this small beautiful city. Nonetheless, we mostly come from different parts of the world bringing along our personal tastes of place, commuting habits and preferences.

Living in the same area in Barcelona (Born), it was of interest to us (Sinem, Stephanie and Akanksha R.) to compare tracks over a short period of few days in an attempt to draw some information regarding our commuting and maneuvering patterns in Barcelona.

Using different Apps, we exported data in .gpx format to be later on extracted as individual input parameters to be visualized in a variety of ways. The track points have been mapped and scaled in reference to 2 points of relevance (Santa Caterina Market and IaaC). Information such as speed was visualized in the form of vertical lines and juxtaposed in the form of growing circles for comparative purposes.