As a member of T1 group, in this session, I studied Water Cube, and one chapter from the book On Growth and Form by D’arcy Thompson. Both of the text and the case are related to find/define form from nature.
Water cube, whose official name is Beijing National Aquatics Center, was built for 2008 Olympic Games. It is a fascinating building, which looks like a gathering of bubbles. The most interesting part of this building is its structure, which is known as Weaire-Phelan foam structure. This structure is a description of idealized foam of equal-sized bubbles in a mathematical way. It is completely regular, but looks random. The design team even rotated it to make it looks more random and organic. When the structure was built, air pillows made of ETFE were used to fill in the frame of the structure to build a continuous bubble-like skin. When those plastic bags are lighten up from inside they look just like bubbles, although during daytime they look gray and dirty.
The text has a title: On the Theory of Transformation, Or the Comparison of Related Forms, which concludes the text quite well. In this chapter, the author mentioned that mathematics is the most precise language to describe our world, but in the morphology of living things the use of mathematical methods had made slow progress. There were variety of reasons, like the complexity of shapes of living things, and people studying them often care more about the differences between different species. But we must learn from mathematician to eliminate and to discard, to keep the type in mind instead of single case. For us, comparison of related forms is more important than precise definition of each. By doing so, we can actually find that many shape is a transformation of another. The author than introduced a grid, and put shapes in it, for instance, a fish, a skull, or a bone. By changing the grid, he could get a series of different fish, skulls, and bones. Although they look different, but topologically they are the same. In short, nature proceeds from one type to another can be defined by physic-mathematical conditions of possibility.
From the text and the case, I gained a new vision of geometry from nature. I always avoid curves and other structures seems complex when designing in the past, because I didn’t know the logic behind them. But now I know that in nature there are many structures that are more efficient, many geometries that are reasonable, at the same time beautiful, and people can actually use the language of mathematics to describe them, moreover, use parameters to control them. The way Thompson did his research also inspired me, for it suggested that, to see things in a different way we may get more information. So I think that I should try to change my view of architecture, as well as the way of design. Like the rhizome, this kind of logic is interesting. Human always like to use structures as grid and tree in the past, for they are simple and clear. But now we have better ability to collect and use information, we should try more possibility, try to learn the complexity form nature instead of just simplify everything, but of course, in a logical way.
To my interest, I would like to learn more about what human can learn from nature. I would like to read the On Growth and Form, the whole book. Also, I would like to learn more about the geometries people learned from nature. I want to know how they can be digitalized and how they can help our design. Also, the rhizome, and the ant society is interesting to me. Because parameters are only parameters, they should present new logic and relation inside so they can be reasonable and meaningful, and that’s what I think most important for advanced architecture. Using a new form is not advanced, but understanding the new form and taking advantage of it is advanced. So I think what I should do from now on, is to enlarge my sight, to study more about the nature, and then, explore the way to apply this new knowledge to my design.
image: http://mypages.iit.edu/~krawczyk/acsa01/a002.jpg