Research's IaaC - Students Research - PG Digital Tectonics

Programme: MAA - Master in Advanced Architecture 2010-2011
Research Line: Digital Tectonics

Students group: Antonio Atripaldi, Cesar Andrés Briceño Guttierez, Ayber Gulfer, Mani Khosrovani

Project description: The research explores the possibility to inject a binding material into sand, using capillarity as the main parameter to emerge a potential new morphological system out of this ancient building material. 

The groups intention is to explore injection, using sand not only as a mold, but as a medium to generate forms that are being shaped by controlling the absorption of the binding material into the sand.

The project is about continuoous relqationship between solids, fluids and empty spaces.

Programme: MAA - Master in Advanced Architecture 2010-2011
Research Line: Digital Tectonics

Students group: Amay Gurkar, Harshad Sutar, Saiqa Iqbal , Vittal Sridharan 

Project description: Recycled FaBric(k) is a project targeting recently demolished sites or disaster hit areas and re-instating the site-found broken bricks as potent design components. The project utilizes the atypical geometry of broken bricks towards researching on possible emergent forms. The resultant is an emergent outcome of user-controlled design inputs & inherent properties of the bricks. The project establishes a site based active design system with a real-time interaction between the design and execution alternate to the conventional office-site interaction making the design process versatile and holistic.

Recycled FaBric(k) collaborates with various autonomous technologies to analyse the design possibilities with these geometries. The broken bricks are reproduced into a digital platform, given an identification tag, analysed of all its properties, sorted and the design outcome is evaluated. The project further creates an interaction platform wherein the tags cross-check the positioning of the sorted bricks in accordance with the design. This opens up an opportunity for the designer to not only verify the execution process in real-time but also to re-evaluate the design in case of a change. This re-evaluated design is communicated via a wireless device thus continuing the active interaction between the execution team and designer all throughout the construction process. The project is conceived as a portable design system which can be executed at any site immediately

Recycled FaBric(k) can easily calculate the energy , manpower requirements as well as resource management thus forming a sustainable and efficient design system..10

Plasti+City is an installation done by students of the IAAC \\\\"Digital Tectonics\\\\" postgraduate program, presented at the construmat 2007 in Barcelona. It is the result of a collaborative exploration with the company LASENTIU to expand the use of Syntrewood, a 100% recycled and 100% recyclable plastic material, through the use of advanced digital design and manufacturing technologies (parametric cad-cam software + CNC fabrication equipment). Plasti+City is an adaptable architectural surface made out of 200 differenciated parts, all derived from identical standard elements.

In order to transcribe “motion” to a static element, such as a tower, Kitaoka’s patterns and drawings, were the base for this skin proposal. This static graphics make use of the peripheral drift illusion principles, creating a motion sensation. Several simulations and attempts of transcribing the pattern onto the tower’s façade were made. Noticing a common element that repeated and scaled in many different ways, provoked a motion illusion sensation. The final proposal was obtained adjusting in a 3D environment an oval shape arranged within the tower’s contour, generating twisted iterations and parametric variations of a common element. Using a 3D printer at IAAC a model was created, in order to test its optical and spatial effects. The 3D model construction helped out to understand the structural properties and performance of the new skin. A series of belts between each group of ovals were designed to provide the structural strength to the powder based model. The 3D printing machine model requirements were very helpful to consolidate a single well composed model. This peculiar external finish proposal would differentiate the tower from the surrounding buildings not only by its shape, also by the extremely appealing skin.