The Los Angeles basin rests above the third largest oil deposit in the United States. During the late 1800’s and into the 1950’s, oil derricks and wells were visible throughout much of LA County (Venice beach, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Long Beach, & Pasadena). Today, much of this infrastructure has been taken down as drilling technologies have improved and in order to accommodate the high demand for property in the region. What most Angeleno’s don’t know is that there are still several dormant derricks hidden within the city, concealed behind false walls or within nondescript buildings.
This speculative project endeavors to answer the question: what might happen if this infrastructure were revealed? The design proposal explores bioengineering, botany, agriculture, and entomology in the development of a bio-lattice. This exoskeleton, the formal result of a bio-refinement process which the crude oil undergoes, serves as an ecological habitat for honey bees and seed-plants. The tower is literally a pollen factory. An attempt at re-programing outdated oil towers for the sake of food security.
This project intended to take surfaces generated in Maya’s nDynamics package and, through a series of grasshopper scripts, articulate them to be responsive to local climatic conditions. The generative process for the overall form of the nested shells was based upon the constraints exhibited within the diagram for Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion. A software suite including three different modelers, two engineering packages, a number of custom built scripts, and several post production programs was utilized in order to develop the final product. Each step was catalogued and turned into a comprehensive presentation which was then given at the Design Factory at Aalto Univerity in Helsinki, Finland in the Spring of 2010. This project was particularly interested in the intentional misuse of various softwares in order to generate surprising and unexpected formal results.
Instructor: Kivi Sotamaa
Project Team: Blake Bethards, Drew Pusey, Adam Fingrut, Aaron Zeligs
This installation is composed of a tensioned net canopy, from which thousands of luminescent droplets are suspended on a cartesian grid. These colorful nodes are opaque during the day and then present an ethereal glow at night. A solar array cleanly powers an ultra violet LED system, activating the swarm’s luminescent qualities and producing a subtle purple haze, which shimmers and moves with the breeze. The installation is composed of 1600 monofiloment strings, and 3200 test tubes that form two intersecting surfaces. In order to construct the installation, the digital model was built in conjunction with Grasshopper, allowing for the extraction of string length, test tube locations, and grid location of each string. The physical fabrication of the project was realized in four weeks, and the desert construction of the project was realized in two days.
Instructor: Mark Mack
Project Team: Blake Bethards, Drew Pusey, Molly Hunker, Kagan Taylor, Matt Gilio-Tenan, Aaron Zeligs, Tom Lance, Jei Kim, Daniella Gohari, Fallon James, Laura Goard, Rebecca Friedberg, Ben Kalenik, Adam Fingrut, Alan Noah-Navarro
A proposed tower for the coast of Abu Dhabi in the year 2045. This project imagines a new paradigm for eco-friendly / energy efficient architecture. Rather than harnessing and converting external energies such as solar or wind to power the building, the tower is imagined to operate as one of several nodes within the smart grid. Currently, utility companies are not able to dynamically and efficiently control their output of electricity. Therefore, energy that is produced is not always used. Conversely, at times of peak demand, utility companies are often not able to satiate consumer requirements. This project proposes that at times of energy abundance, cheap electricity is utilized to pump water into bladders located within the tower’s floorplates. At moments when the electrical grid calls for an increase in energy, the bladders are emptied, sending water through a series of turbines which in turn supply the city with additional power. As this occurs, the floorplates expand and contract. The tower dynamically re-organizes itself and the building can be observed as a literal diagram of current energy consumption for the city.
Formalized Materiality: In the spirit of creating a soft, supple form to stage exhibits, we experimented with felt sheets that could tolerate gentle curvature. These explorations attempted to infuse the material logics that are inherent within the felt into our final formal and massing strategies. The design intent was to develop a formal approach which operated successfully within the constraints of the site and programmatic requirements. Toroidal masses were found to work well in an aqueous environment as their radial surface geometry resists the homogenous upward pressure exerted by the water and accomodates a spatial diagram where visitors circulate around an activated center. Visitors travel tangent to the surface of each module, allowing for a continual unfolding of experiences as each scene is cinematically revealed from behind the natural curvature of the form.
Synthetic Materiality: The main pavilion is the focus of our research on synthetic material applications. We chose to consciously treat the exterior of the pavilion as an unadorned monolithic shell absent of color or other forms of embellishment aside from a fenestration system and low-res panelization that runs across its surface. This articulation follows line-work derived from the underlying structural logic of the shell and the coarse sensibility of the exterior shell is further highlighted as sunlight casts hard shadows along the facets. This approach to the exterior stands in stark contrast to the treatment of the interior surfaces. As visitors enter the pavilion, they are treated to a much more exotic and dynamic environment, one which is unexpectedly soft, supple, and saturated. The ceiling of the expansive exhibition space is lined with bulging protrusions that are tentacle-like in their arrangement and formal expression, serving to thicken the atmosphere with color and texture, dampen sound, and modulate scale in an otherwise vast space. The soft, furry geometries swirl around each aperture so that light filters in mysteriously through dense collections of material. Reveals of color flicker through the dense bunches of material, engaging time as a critical dimension of experiencing synthetic materiality in an animated realm.
