single-family home

(1of2)

First set of drawings from a single-family home project for school.

Getting a grip on the surroundings:

After an initial study of the surroundings, several ways of tackling this project have been bouncing up and down in my head. I won’t go through all the urban analysis of the area, suffice to say that taking into account the general characteristics (building regulations, urban tissue, the relation between buildings and their respective lots) and specific characteristics (how much sun do I get and from where? how much privacy? what role does vegetation play?) I was able to identify some “core variables” around which I could start working.

The site is a corner site. This must be reflected in the construction.

I  can’t directly attack the corner due to the constraint pushed by the general characteristic mentioned above – the relation between buildings and their respective lots – they all are free-standing separate objects.

Sunlight. The south is blocked by high-rise (10 stories) buildings. I must get the most out of what reaches the site while still offering a decent level of privacy (imagine 20 apartments looking down into your house).

The program was a classical single-family home (living room, kitchen, dining, 3 bedrooms, study/library, garage). I also wanted to open up the spaces inside towards the garden and the trees (which act as a natural privacy shield) surrounding the lot.

Air must come in and then out (get as much natural ventilation as possible).

Porosity sprang to mind. What if I can create a living, adaptive porous block that acts as a retreat and yet still opens up to let in fresh air, sunlight, perspective and, most important, a family? I investigated a little bit of fractals, went through to fractal architecture and, most important early-on in the design process, (Steven Holl‘s) porosity architecture.

Initial concept (working towards porosity): *note: this is not how the final project looks like. the img below is just a concept sketch.

So, all talk and no scripts? Wait, no!

More to come in the next post. I promise you adaptive (in relation to an attractor/point) porosity on a given surface and a massive unroll script.

Here’s a nifty script to create a menger sponge in Rhino:

Option Explicit

‘
‘Script written by Dimitrie Stefanescu
‘Released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0
‘

Call sponge()

Constanta – design proposal for the waterfront of the leisure port

We started out on this by analyzing the area and its surroundings from the point of view of circulation (more on how we did this). How would people move around? The conclusions from this study where integrated later on in the project.

Next we took on the task of (re)creating the landscape – modify the terrain in a functional yet unobtrusive way. Formal concepts revolved around radiolaria, foam, water, waves etc. Luckily we had a working circle packing applet in processing ready (which was used for this). From here on, it was quite straightforward: expand the circles to smooth spherical caps and smartly transform them into urban furniture.

The interstitial space that remained between the”bubbles” is packed with wood alongside the routes we discovered to be ideal using the circulation study. The rest is English lawn pure green smartly-cut grass.

This project is a collaboration between Veronica and me.

Tools we used include:
Processing was VERY important early on in the design process – we used it for the circulation study as well as for the early circle packing experiments (size, density, spread etc).

Rhino and RhinoScript: RhinoScript is great – we used it extensively (create spherical caps based on the generating circle’s radius, expand circles, contract circles, import circles which the processing applet generated, etc.). Rhino was used for everything else – 3D modelling and, of course, making valid STL files for the 3D printer and also exporting the right things for the laser printer.

Laser cutting was done here (as always).

3D wax models were kindly made for us by mazarom (at the moment the only 3D printing service in Bucharest). If you need a complicated model, don’t hesitate to contact them!

Plotting the final presentation was done at studio spot. They don’t have a webiste…

State of the union no2

Things evolve:

Veronica and me (Dimitrie). This could have looked better, but alas, we had to make a 1m x 1.3m model in the same time.

Perfume, Voronoi Regions and Architecture

That would summarize my last project at the design studio. Our theme consisted of creating a “perfume museum” at a site located in the vicinity of the Mogosoaia Palace. (I found it to be a very difficult site – history, tradition, nature etc. how to properly integrate a building in such a rich and precise context is a question that remains open.)

The project’s challenge was to transpose the notion of perfume in an architectural form. Wikipedia suggests many trails. Chevalier’s Dictionary of Symbols suggests some more. Balzac: “Tout parfum est une combinaison d’air et de lumiere.”; Hugo: “Le parfum est de la lumiere.”. Floral motifs, blobitecture, incense and religion, drugs – it was up to you to decide on how to visually speculate perfume.

I was fed up of the meanings and interpretations of perfume. Perfume nowadays is synthetic. Leave me be. Smell chemistry. You can’t contradict that.

I broke the visual representations of the chemical components of a standard perfume (chemical representations have very strict geometric rules – 120 deg angles, pentagons and hexagons) and got voronoi regions.

Ahhh, sweet metaphor of computational architecture. Isn’t it beautiful? Elegant? Yet it has nothing to do with architecture. Form is detached from function and we are approaching a similar crisis of that of modernism, when the exact opposite happened. People don’t find themselves included in such designs. Computation that strictly refers to form/ellegance alienates architecture from its goals. I don’t trust the starchitect theory as being the solution; it won’t last or it will split us into sculptors and engineers. 

(Please do read that article. It’s a must. It shows past (as in blobitecture and zaha), present(not the “so last year” deconstructivism or – worse even – post-modernism) and pushes through to the question posed by the future.)

Enough theoretical blabber. I’m giving all this computational business some thought. Code in architecture is nice, as long as it serves the people, not just ellegance. (Please do notice I didn’t use the term “function”. I prefer the much more accurate and revelatory word “people” = complex emergent system.)

Here are some pics of the model:

Programmed in Rhino. Finished in Sketchup. Model made in ManualManufacturyCAD(hand glued). Laser cutting here.