Rumble Update
On
by Deane Madsen
A classmate noted that our studio was one of the topics covered in a recent blog post by Rennie Tang & Houston Drum about UCLA’s Rumble:
Rumble Tower
On
by Deane Madsen
We have a 3d print of our site that we wanted to display for Rumble – we got it from Shapeways, and it just barely arrived in time. The cool thing about the 3d print, though, is that it came out translucent, thanks to its minimal thickness. I’d laid claim to the 3d printing process, and so it fell to me to design the stand upon which the model sat. I thought it might be fun to play with the translucency in the base for the stand, and developed the following concept:
Basically, it involved building a model stand fitted to the 3d print, with hidden casters so we could move it around, and an opaque white acrylic top to diffuse light from below. The setup would also involve a door on the backside of the stand, so that lights could be turned off when not in use, and a shelf upon which the lights would rest. Here’s the finished product from above:
And here’s Richard Weinstein taking a closer look:
Charting Building Shapes
On
by Deane Madsen
In an effort to categorize what we’ve been doing, we have diagrammed a few different typologies. Right now it’s all stemming from these iterations of Grasshopper manoeuvres, so we have the following classifications:
a) inverted v. regular
b) intersecting v. separate
c) edge condition v. landlocked
d) axis-normal v. axis-tilted
I made some super-quick dumb diagrams to illustrate the differences:
This led to a differentiation of zones, and another classification system. The zones are an effort to maximize southern exposure, such that buildings in the southern-most zone, Zone 1, don’t get too tall to block buildings in Zone 2, and buildings in Zone 2 don’t block buildings in Zone 3. Within each zone, there are small, medium, and large buildings, each size of which would probably correspond to different programs across the zones. A small in Zone 1 would still be smaller than a small in Zone 2, if that makes sense. We were thinking about trying to use our diagrams to codify each building, so that by reading icons, one might be able to tell what decisions had informed its shape, size, axial orientation, etc. – and we came up with this resulting diagram:
Grasshopping
On
by Deane Madsen
In studio, Neil has asked us to evaluate more parameters, but also to design at a human scale, which is one thing most parametric urbanist projects aren’t talking about. Parameters, you say? As it turns out, I have several of my own up my sleeve, having been dabbling in the realm of Grasshopper to form base units for our towers. It’s crazy because there’s an architecture and a beauty to the equations required to make a digital form, but so far the forms themselves are pretty bland. It would seem like an easy task to do something like tilt the axis of a building – and, in practice, it is. The problem is making the tilt less arbitrary. In Rhino, I can model something, then align the things I’ve modeled along a curve that’s tilted to whatever angle I choose. That’s all fine, but I really don’t want to go through the operations of tilting each tower when I have, say, 37 of them. That’s thirty-six repetitions of a task – which is where Grasshopper comes in. But it actually takes a few additional steps in GH to make it happen – it’s not just drawing a line – it’s drawing a line, defining its endpoints, and moving the endpoints, then redrawing the line to the new endpoints. Craziness. Now, at least, it’s up and running, but it took a lot of thinking on paper, like this:
