Presentation boards describing my design for an interactive performance space in Odense have been finished, and can be viewed by clicking on the image below.
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Critical written reflection
The following article presents my semester project as an interview with myself, the architect, after the project has been completed. It presents the project in a mostly chronological order of work done in the semester, starting with the site analysis and moving into the interactive elements and then the form.
The article has acted as a tool for reflection on my work, and also to prepare for the final presentation of the project. During the writing process I found myself asking questions about my work as a prompt for content creation. Presenting the project in the form of an interview allows me to speak honestly and in a direct manner, as if I had the opportunity to engage directly with the reader.
Odense site analysis
The most striking feature of the new city plan for Thomas B. Thriges Street in Odense, Denmark is also the most unnoticed. Beneath the collection of new buildings and squares is a massive underground parking area designed to maximize usable surface area and eliminate the presence of the automobile from the city square.
How we move from above to below provides a starting point to examine how these transitions occur. Is it a straightforward movement, such as a simple staircase, or can we create an articulated design that captures the essence of our vertical travel? The following pie charts show that the most common way to access the underground are by stairs, and the most significant places they lead to are regional urban areas.
Cross-referencing my observations with the proposed locations of stairwells at the site led me to focus on three areas where an architectural intervention could occur. The Musikhuspassagen, Overgade and Albani Torv are regional urban areas that bisect the site in different locations. The stairwells in these areas are located within the buildings, and the master is not detailed enough to indicate whether these passages are private or public. A series of passages that are publicly-accessible would provide an opportunity to design forms that are free of the dimensional constraints of surrounding buildings and could be placed at central points in the three areas. The passages could serve to entice people into moving either above or below ground through their form and function.
Central to my concept of three vertical passages is the phenomena of interaction, which creates meaning on multiple levels. Interactive architecture acts as the antithesis to the classical practice of creating a static building as an end-result and instead imbues a certain uncertainty through a constantly-changing form. Applying these concepts to the passages, we construct a network of linked nodes that share information between each other in order to determine their form. In this way the passages act not only as a physically constructed object but also as signifiers of social meaning. Paul Dorish describes this situation as “[a]rtifacts and representations carry(ing) different sorts of meanings simultaneously, and activities are caught up in many different tasks at the same time” (Dorish, 123). Using these concepts we can imagine the passages taking on many functions, perhaps acting as waypoints to navigate the massiveness of the site, or as meeting and interaction points for people. These classifications distinguish between the functions of the passages – on the one hand they are constructed architectural entities with a function of transporting people between levels, and on the other hand they are a collection of embodied actions, events, operations and behaviours.
But what criteria would the passages use to create an interactive architectural system? What environmental data are we interested in observing and exploring? Referring back to Oxman’s criticism of sensing being a post-gestural addition in the building process, we must consider these points before we begin to arrive at an architecture that is uninformed by the dynamics of its environment. The Musikhuspassagen, Overgade and Albani Torv areas are designed as vibrant corridors that bustle with various aspects of everyday city life, including open-air markets, cafés and congregation areas. A quick exercise of examining the site plans and renderings from the master plan and making point-form observations of the activities in each area provides us with the following data:
Musikhuspassagen:
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Public space connecting music and theatre house
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Fixtures and fittings inviting individual expression – oriented towards older children/adolescents
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Green space inviting areas to play basketball, rest in hammocks, parkour
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Thematic elements to preserve the sense of magic theatre-goers have experienced before returning to “reality”
Overgade:
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Recreates historic city cross-connection and reconnects shopping areas
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Historical lines of sight
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Very busy and bustling
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Cultural supplement in the form of media/info screens
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Benches for seating
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Cycle path runs through the area
Albani Torv:
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Informal meeting and socializing
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Ties the valley’s landscape together across the square
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Grass islands with trees to provide sitting areas
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Can be turned into an area for pavilions/tents
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Historic area
All three areas encourage interaction, transforming them from simple travel corridors into destination points that offer a range of ways to interact with the site. The process of moving from a series of actions to an architectural form is a linear one:
Activities → Interactions → Architecture
In other words, the activities can be used as the elements that dictate the types of interactions we want to see occur, which then in turn will inform the architecture. An examination of the three sites results in a simplified list of the primary activities I want to look at.
Connections – Each area has an explicit purpose of connecting two spaces together – either through a new connection or by reviving a historical one. Each connection carries a story behind it that can be told through building and interaction.
Congregation – Even though each area is a passage that connects one place to another, they invite the traveller to stay and treat the space as a destination point rather than a corridor. Green areas, benches, hammocks and street-level cafés entice people to stay a while.
Communication – It is logical that with congregation emerges communication. The spaces offer spaces where dialogue can emerge from chance encounters or arranged meetings. Our methods of communication can be affected by how we congregate and where we position ourselves within a space.
Play – Further bolstering the concept of urban passages that entice people to stay are the numerous ways that we are encouraged to play and experience each space – through tactile feeling, small environmental tweaking such as islands of grass, parkour and games, we gain a sense of belonging in our surroundings that excites us in different ways and encourages us to explore.
Workshop: Extreme Detail – Part 1
From October 27-31, 2014, my studio group (Digital Transformation) and Studio MAD participated in a workshop aimed at learning how to use the school’s CNC 5-axis milling machine through the creation of a “lighting object.” Students were put into three working groups, with two subgroups in each. One subgroup was responsible for the form of the lighting object, and the other group was responsible for the surface patterning.
I was placed in the form subgroup. We used Grasshopper to modify the properties of a cylindrical mesh and the Kangaroo plugin for Grasshopper to apply gravity and basic force dynamics to the form. Our aim was to create a shape made of planarized quads that would eventually be milled out of plywood sheets in the CNC mill. Kangaroo has a helpful component called “planarize quads” which tries to force the shape to be planar on each side so it can be cut out of flat sheets.
The form we arrived at provided a simple enough shape to be cut out of three large sheets of plywood while creating an architectural typology that justified use of the CNC mill.
The next step was to prepare the form for cutting on the CNC mill. This was done by labeling each quad in the form and then placing them flat.
We decided that the structure would be held together by binding and used another Grasshopper sketch to create evenly-spaced holes around the perimeter of each sheet. The binding sketch found the perimeter of the shape, created an offset perimeter a certain distance inwards, and then placed holes at equal intervals.
The patterning subgroup provided us with a series of contoured holes to place on the face of each quad. During this process we extruded the quads to match the thickness of the plywood. With the binding holes and contours placed, we then arranged the quads onto the plywood sheets and prepared the Alphacam files, which would be used by the CNC machine to interpret our Rhino drawing.
Sheets 1-3
Preparing the Alphacam files was a difficult process, as almost none of the students in the workshop had used the software before. We relied heavily on the workshop instructors to guide us through this process. In order to prepare a Rhino drawing for export to the CNC machine, the basic steps are to import the Rhino geometry into Alphacam, select your cutting tools and define your tool paths. The Alphacam file is then exported to the CNC machine as G-code.
Part two will detail the milling and assembly process.
Odense infographics
I spent last week researching the area around Thomas B. Thriges Street in Odense as a means of locating where I wanted to situate my project. Having a previous interest in information graphics, I focused on the data concerning how people get from the underground parkade to the street level and used it to create a series of pie charts and a usage diagram.
The data shows that one of the most common ways to move from underground to above is via stairwells located throughout the site, and that most of these stairwells are located around areas designated as “regional urban areas” – this is the Musikhuspassagen, Overgade and Albani Torv areas:
Using this information, my aim is to create two or three transition points which will connect the underground to the street level. These structures will be independent of the buildings on the site but their architectural qualities will be informed by their surroundings. Perhaps these transition points will serve as “waypoints” that guide people through the site and will somehow interact with each other. They will most likely contain stairs as the method of vertical movement, but should not be represented in the form of a traditional building staircase. The XBees will feature in the physical model as a method of creating interactive architecture.
My next step will be to create a basic material and structural catalogue of the buildings surrounding each site that will inform these transition points.
Workshop: Extreme Detail – Part 2
The school has a large 5-axis CNC machine that we used to cut out the pieces of the lighting object. The process actually took longer than expected due to the large number of binding holes. Average cut time was probably around 45 minutes – 1 hour per sheet. In the first pass, the CNC drilled the binding holes.
In the second pass, the CNC drilled out the contours that were on each quad. The actual edges of the quads were done as the last step. This is important to note, since once the quads are cut free of the plywood sheet they are free to move around on the cutting table, which would make any precision drilling on it impossible.
We also had an incident occur where a stray piece that was cut out from the contours was thrown up on the sheet to lay on top of it. The drill head happened to come down right overtop of this piece. Upon contact the piece shattered and the CNC machine halted! We had to reset the machine to continue.
The cut pieces required thorough hand-sanding in order to remove the rough edges that formed. The next step was assembling the structure using string to bind it. We attached rice paper to the insides of the quads in order to diffuse the interior light. As a final detail, we ran some LED strip lights inside the lighting object. Check out the time-lapse video to see how we assembled it:
Conclusions: The workshop gave students a chance to use the school’s CNC machine to bring a computer-generated form into physical space. We accomplished this in the short time frame of only five days, with a few sacrifices: the tight timeline meant that we could not test out our ideas, so we didn’t actually know how the final design would hold up in terms of assembly and fit.
The design process partially suffered from the inability to fully automate some processes of the parametric design. The patterns team provided us with the concentric lines to cut the contours all flattened on the z-axis, so we had to manually move each set of rings down 2mm each so that the contours would be cut correctly. We had to move our binding holes inward on each quad once we realized during a simulated cutting that they were too close to the edges.
Alphacam was mentioned a few times by one of the workshop instructors as a “terrible” piece of software to handle CNC milling. There were many occasions where only the instructors knew the right settings needed. I am confident that I could not cut anything on my own, despite the CNC machine being free for all students to use.
It was very difficult to find the right combination of settings in our Grasshopper sketch that would produce truly planar quads for cutting. There was a tolerance issue of +/- 1mm all around, which greatly affected the edges of the quads. Instead of being made from a single planar edge, most of them had a bit of “warp,” associated with the edge being made from a double curve. It seems that there should be a better way to ensure that the final form is planar.
The binding holes turned out to be very snug, and in some cases the string wouldn’t fit through without the hole needing widening with a tool. In retrospect, we should have made larger holes. The binding process as we designed it was very time-consuming during assembly. A different assembly technique would have benefited the project.
The lighting object that our team produced was an excellent example of what you can produce on a CNC machine with a week of work. Further experimentation with the machine would result in projects with a higher degree of craft, and it would be worthwhile to experiment with other materials as the plywood had a tendency to splinter on the edges where the wood grain ran perpendicular to the cutting direction.
I’m not sure if I will use the school’s CNC machine in my own work yet, but it now appears a lot more accessible than it was before.
Wireless communication with Arduino – Part 4
Recently I’ve been using Andrew Rapp’s XBee library for Arduino so that I can start to communicate with more than one radio module at a time. This is a crucial step, and as the screenshot below shows, now the code can also tell me the XBee’s address.
I found a great code example of how to display information from each XBee at this blog – it’s invaluable!
The next step is to take the data from each XBee and probably insert it into an array that gets passed to Grasshopper.
