Arch 201.02 – Jeremy Carvalho w/ Onur Gun + Charlie Portelli – Fa’07
Pratt Arch 201.02 Studio Fa’07
Jeremy Carvalho w/ Onur Gun + Charlie Portelli
T.A.: Adrian Lo, Saman Hosseini
Undergraduate Architecture Program
Arch 201 Intermediate Design Studio
and integrated RhinoScript sequence
Nested Structure: A Waterfront Kindergarten
“The strange attractor lives in phase space, one of the most powerful inventions of modern science. Phase space gives a way of turning numbers into pictures, abstracting every bit of essential information from a system of moving parts, mechanical or fluid, and making a flexible road map to all its possibilities.” p. 134
“The attractor was stable, low-dimensional, and nonperiodic. It could never intersect itself, because if it did, returning to a point already visited, from then on the motion would repeat itself in a periodic loop. That never happened – that was the beauty of the attractor. Those loops and spirals were infinitely deep, never quite joining, never intersecting. Yet they stayed inside a finite space, confined in a box. How could that be? How could infinitely many paths lie in a finite space?” p. 140
“Indeed, the folding and squeezing of space was a key to constructing strange attractors, and perhaps a key to the dynamics of the real systems that gave rise to them. Rössler felt that these shapes embodied a self-organizing principle in the world. … The principle is that nature does something against its own will and, by self-entanglement, produces beauty.” pp. 142-143
Quoted from Chaos; Making a New Science, James Gleick, Penguin 1988 (emphases added)
Inspired by strange attractors as abstract models of atmospheric behavior, this studio takes a procedural approach toward generating & embedding cycles of dynamic activity, institutional program, and structured enclosure into an urban waterfront site. Building projects integrate cyclical behavior with densely structured terrain generated by a series of phased studies.
Site Analysis Phase I:
Site phenomena modeled as cyclical behavior
An urban waterfront site is analyzed as a volumetric condition in which several phenomena are dynamically related. Interactions among wind, water, & light are notated as cyclical relationships and assembled as virtual models based upon simple rule sets or ‘pseudocode.’ Behavioral rule sets are related to type, degree & interval of pressure or temperature change over the course of daily or seasonal cycles.
Volume / Surface Interactions Phase II:
Circulation & structural diagrams modeled as recursive routines
Physical models attempt to structure and catalyze spatial conditions for future integration with program and site conditions of the waterfront park. Recursive surface packing / folding routines are enacted within a volumetric model of the site, generating multiple trajectories and types of potential movement. Resultant models organize a variety of children’s activities into daily learning cycles.
Building Organization / Institution Phase III:
Programmatic behavior integrated with structured terrain
Classroom and assembly functions are examined within the developing volume of the project site. Dynamic movement, intricately layered spatial conditions, and stark variations among sleep, study, & play activities are organized according to multiple pragmatic criteria.
RhinoScript Sequence:
Coding for geometric relationships and application to building systems
The parallel development of scripting routines is used to study interactive geometric relationships contained in virtual & physical model studies. Script routines are refined for eventual application to building systems; the control of script syntax begins to articulate nested ordering systems within each proposal.
Site:
State Park @
Building Type:
Kindergarten
Program Description:
Educational facility with extensive landscaping & pickup / drop off area.
Gross area: 20,000SF
Semi-enclosed / exterior landscaping: 5,000 SF
Maximum height limit: 35’
