Tuesday, August 4, 2009

faceted structures

focusing on producing complex double-curved geometries using standard construction materials, the concept of folding flat metal sheets, similar to "origami", allows one to triangulate geometries and generate long folded strips of material that can then be fastened together.

here is a quick study for a folded metal structural system. at the moment the system is very similar to the folded metal ceiling in that it has no "thickness" and would rely on a primary and secondary structural system. the next step is to develop a 3-dimensional 'voxel' unit with volume to become a self-supporting structural component.

the openings in the system are randomly sized to create a non-repetitive pattern. the next area of study will be fenestration & solar responsivity, and sizing of the individual components based on structural performance.

"A voxel (a portmanteau of the words volumetric and pixel) is a volume element, representing a value on a regular grid in three dimensional space. As with pixels in a bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (their coordinates) explicitly encoded along with their values. Instead, the position of a voxel is inferred based upon its position relative to other voxels (i.e., its position in the data structure that makes up a single volumetric image). In contrast to pixels and voxels, points and polygons are often explicitly represented by the coordinates of their vertices. A direct consequence of this difference is that polygons are able to efficiently represent simple 3D structures with lots of empty or homogeneously-filled space, while voxels are good at representing regularly-sampled spaces that are non-homogeneously filled." --Wikipedia






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