Jeffrey Sipprell

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December 23, 2005

Minimal Surfaces - Conclusion

Well it's almost the conclusion - all of our work is in a school exhibition slated for mid February, so I'm sure these drawings and renderings will be worked on a bit more. AND, since the 3d printer broke down in the final week (what a p.o.s.), I'll be able to print the models that I spent days thickening.

So, let's wrap things up for now. As you know we've been developing the same minimal surface system that I had from the summer - the Starfish 2 system. It's a very cellular system that very easily creates space and enclosure. The problem, which was hinted at in the first course, was how to make connections between these cells and how to make more mat like walkable surfaces. That was our starting point back in late September. The introduction of the coral gave us the idea of the unfurling line - or a conceptual surface that could oscillate between taut and loose surface conditions. The design problem then became how to gradiate this change across a site to deal with hierarchy, entry, floor plates, etc...

Our solution was the development of a morphology based on a series of spines that stretch out from a central spine before unwinding into cellular space and bumping up against the urban edges of the site. This led to the development of the site plan which used the diagram as a strategy for deploying the system - larger stretched cells that reached out to the bridge and created the main large spaces and smaller squashed cells that stacked in the back to create floor plates and smaller discrete occupiable spaces. The system was then gradiated in the north south direction via the size and orientation of the buildings and apertures. The southern most aggregation served as the parking garage which was comprised of all stretched, taut surfaces. As the aggregations moved north, the surfaces began to loosen up and become more spatially hierarchical, particularly along the eastern edge. This diagram highlights our strategy to develop a sided condition where the northern facade was very taut while the southern was allowed to unfurl as it reached out towards the edge. Conceptually, the tautness would reach around the building and capture the unfurling - creating a very stretched fingered facade to the east, although the sawtooth like stepping back of each aggregation allowed for a portion of the unfurled side to explode out into the public space.

After developing the main minimal surface system, we began to look for moments where we could add second and third order elements that would begin to give the system structure and scale. Again, we looked to the coral as a model and began to explore the small apertures that appeared in the center of each polyp surface. Our minimal surface system has an equal importance placed on center and structure as it is the two main structural axes of the hyperbolic paraboloid that locate the center point of the 2 curvatures. So we deployed a second order aperture at each center point of the individual surfaces - which undoubtedly would become more dense as you moved from entry to back of building.

The interesting thing that came out of this was that sometimes these apertures were in a horizontal orientation while at other times they were in a vertical orientation. The design therefore played this up by treating them the same from the exterior (deep punctures in the skin) while on the interior, vertical punctures linked together to form columns and horizontal punctures became deep recessed openings. The columns linked the centers of surfaces together which created a pretty interesting, though chaotic, network of angled columns that can best be seen in the long and short sections.

Now obviously this puncture into the center and arguably most structural part of the surface is counter-intuitive to the way the surface worked. So it was a natural progression that we played up the linear and edgelike quality of our surface system by designing beams that were along the previously mentioned structural axes of the surface (called the C2 axes in mathematical jargon). While this system probably could use another level of development, it was fairly successful in giving the spaces we were creating the desired sense of scale and structure - something that no other group in the class really pursued.

In fact the review focused mostly on this system and the choice we made to make the project more of a building then a more geometric study - particulary since we followed a group that was the exact opposite of our project - smooth flowing unstructured spaces where the original surface bled into an almost monstrous like quality of space and skin. The debate was mixed, but in the end I agreed with Denari that we should have pursued the structure even more and began to exploit differential thickness and poche - something which I was hoping to do after my summer project, but was just never gotten to since the quarter was spent getting the system under control. That idea focused on two unfurling surfaces that would create thickness and thinness as they moved around and against each other, but I guess that'll be for another project.

All in all, a struggle throughout was rewarded in the end by having a good project. It was received pretty well by the final jury, so that in itself was a reward. I'll post some more pictures of the review and other projects, along with whatever upgrades I make to drawings/models between now and February.

Posted by jsipprell at December 23, 2005 11:23 AM

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