dining experience

here are some images of my modular dining experience

cellular living

following the previous post, here are some studies of stacking the duplex units horizontally.

cellular living

i'm currently working on a residential project based on a voronoi planar composition.

banco

again starting from a primitive geometry, the cube, i'm using old-school 'push-and-pull' modeling methods to deform the cube to generate an appealing object. the flower blossom is a low stool that can be placed anywhere and clustered together to create social seating areas.

deformed box house

this is a small case study i'm working on called the deformed box house. essentially starting as a box it is deformed to explore the functional spaces that can emerge. the module can be rotated and mirrored to create extensions and additions to the primary box. cladding was generated with a voronoi script, interesting development was to keep the larger elliptical surfaces and allow apertures only at the intersections.

more images to come...

honeycomb script

here are a few images of a rhino scripting exercise to create a gradient honeycomb pattern on a surface. the surface i used was that of my AADRL TEN proposal. the script essentially plots a honeycomb grid, scaling down the hexagons closest to the 'locators', in this case a randomly plotted point cloud. the gradience can be controlled by pre-defining the location of the locators.

chaise lounge

here are some conceptual images for a lounge chair i'm working on made of molded fiberglass.

Stockholm

i took these photos in 2003 during my trip through sweden and finland.

Rock Church

i was in helsinki a few years ago and visited the amazing Temppeliaukio Church.

"Temppeliaukio Church (Temppeliaukion Kirkko in Finnish) is a Lutheran church in the TöölöHelsinki. The church was designed by architects and brothers Timo and Tuomo Suomalainen, and opened in 1969. neighborhood of

The Temppeliaukio (Temple square) was selected as a location for a church in the 1930s, but the plan by J. S. Siren, the winner of the second competition to design the architecture of the church, was interrupted in its early stages when WWII began in 1939. After the war, there was another architectural competition, which was won by Timo Suomalainen and Tuomo Suomalainen in 1961. For economic reasons, the suggested plan was scaled back and the interior space of the church reduced by about one-quarter from the original plan. Construction finally began in February of 1968, and the rock-temple was completed for consecration in September of 1969.

The interior was excavated and built into the rock, but is bathed in natural light entering through the glazed dome. The church is used frequently as a concert venue due to its excellent acoustics. The acoustic quality is ensured by the rough, virtually unworked, rock surfaces. Leaving the interior surfaces of the church exposed was not something that was in the original plans for the church, but the orchestra conductor Paavo Berglund and the acoustician, Mauri Parjo, contributed to the plans. The back wall of the altar is a majestic rock wall, originally created by a withdrawing glacier.

The Temppeliaukio church is one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city; half a million people visit it annually. The stone-hewn church is located in the heart of Helsinki. Maintaining the original character of the square is the fundamental concept behind the building. The idiosyncratic choice of form has made it a favorite with professionals and aficionados of architecture.

The church furnishings were designed by the architects. Organ builder Veikko Virtanenchurch organ, which has 43 stops. manufactured the

Unusually, there are no bells at the church, and a recording of bells composed by Taneli Kuusisto is played via loudspeakers on the exterior wall.

The construction of the church created several controversies. Youths were known to have painted graffiti at the construction site to bring attention to the famine in Africa with slogans of "BIAFRA!". Thanks to its squat shape and apparently impervious stone construction, the church is also occasionally known as the "Anti-Devil Defense Bunker" ("Piruntorjuntabunkkeri")." WikiPedia

signs at war

these were taken during my visit to hong kong in 2004. the street signage and adverts are amazing. trying to out-do one another the signs reach further and further over the street to create an aggregated neon canopy, a physical manifestation (or predecessor) of those annoying web pop-ups. the interesting thing about this signage war is that they actually manage to mask the dilapidated 50 story housing blocks above them.

panoramic set

a few photos i've taken in the past 5 years, part of my panoramic 'landscape' collection:

view of nyc from liberty state park

view of the houses of parliament

view of the houses of parliament

my hometown, city of torres vedras

the old elctro-domestics factory, casa hipolito, in torres vedras

Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion

latest site photos of the bridge, provided by the project architect manuela gatto.

photos were taken on the day before the right bank portion, seen below (138 meters long and weighing 2070 tons), was launched 27 meters over the river ebro connecting to the other half already in place.

DRL TEN Pavilion

The AADRL_TEN pavilion is a bio-morphic formal expression of the DRL’s growth, reflecting the foundation of the graduate programme to its current world-wide recognition and prestige. The aim of this proposal is to test the structural capabilities of fibre-c as a suitable material for non-standard forms.

The panels have been designed based on the structural principle of corrugation, folding a flat sheet of material to increase its structural properties. The edges of the panels are folded to create rigid modules. The modules are stacked and bolted together with steel plate connections to form ribs, and each rib is fastened together to create an overall rigid tubular system. The folded edges of the modules transfer vertical forces to the laminated timber support structure. The infill surface of the module serves for lateral bracing and can be milled with a pattern to reduce material weight in areas of larger spans, creating a play between solid and transparency.

The challenge was to create repetition in the modules while trying to follow the complex curvature of the pavilion’s form. By breaking apart the overall form into typical zones, five moulds can be used to fold the wet fibre-c sheets. Each mould can create between four and six variations resulting in a total of 22 unique panel types.

Looking at a rule based system of neighbour associations, a voronoi script was used to produce the tessellation pattern, maintaining the surface’s structural requirement through its triangulated apertures. Using variation in flat panel sizes and applying apertures in specific locations created a pixelization of the pavilion’s surface and was enhanced by using five shades of grey standard to the fibre-c collection.

DRL TEN Pavilion

The aim of this option is to test the structural capabilities of fibre-c while achieving a complex formal expression.

The pavilion is a formal expression of the growth of the DRL, starting from a small tail growing and engulfing everyone that comes to see it, reflecting the foundation of the graduate programme to the DRL’s current worldwide recognition and prestige.

The edges of the fibre-c panels are folded to create a rigid framed module. The modules are stacked and fastened together to form a structural rib, each rib is fastened together to create a rigid structural tubular system. In one direction the edges of the fibre-c modules behave as rings to transfer the weight down to the laminated timber support structure. In the other direction the edges act as lateral bracing. The infill pieces of the modules can then be milled with a pattern to create a global emergent effect as well as reducing material weight in areas of larger spans.

The challenge is to create repetition in the modules, by breaking apart the overall form into zones, each zone will use a unique module type. The module types range from square (at both ends of the pavilion) to diamond shaped (at the center of the pavilion), and infill pattern curvature goes from single (both ends of pavilion) to conical (at the center of the pavilion).