Digital Architecture

“Dark Places”

servo, 2006

Detail showing image scrape.

Diagram of image scrape.

Detail of touch-screen interface.

Production of canopy units during installation.

Section drawings.

Completed project at Santa Monica Museum of Art. Photo: Erdman Photography

Book Reference:

Digital Fabrications Architectural and Material Techniques by Lisa Iwamoto 
https://amzn.to/3Gt0s2u

Tool-Hide
Ruy Klein, 2006

This project manipulates the technical limitations of CNC milling to produce ornamentation, using animal hides as a conceptual starting point. A set of four oversize closet doors were fabricated and then staggered in an overlapping pattern.

The fabrication technique carefully managed the size of the router bit with a corresponding network of manipulated tooling paths to produce a cellular pattern of “scallops”— artifacts of a crude pass over the digitally formed surface geometry.

Left unsanded, the tactile surface bore a texture akin to an elephant or iguana skin.

Concept related to iguana skin.

Tool paths.

Surface sample tests

Surface sample tests

Book Reference:

Digital Fabrications Architectural and Material Techniques by Lisa Iwamoto 
https://amzn.to/3Gt0s2u

Gradient Scale
SPAN, 2005

Gradient Scale was conceived and built for the group exhibition “AustriArchitecture.” The project explores issues of nonsequential scalar growth, surface articulation, and the panelization of a continuous nonrepeating surface using CNC fabrication methods. The design challenges the concept of scale in architecture and establishes a conceptual “digitalscape” as a testing ground for leaping scalar associations in viewing the exhibition.

To achieve a continuously growing scalar model, the architects developed an MEL script that repeated a series of five curves along the predefined length of the exhibition object. These curves were connected in Maya, creating a “bi-rail” surface.

Through several iterations of forces influencing the surface, different degrees of articulations of the final element were created. The undulating surface can be read as a repetition of the one-to-one detail: the greater the frequency of the curves grows, the flatter the amplitude of the curves gets, resulting in a pattern that can be read as a texture in an urban scale.


Issues connected to digital production methods were explored using a three-axis milling machine. Using the milling software, SPAN calculated the tool paths to examine different surface patterns. These patterns emerged from the isoparms derived from the computational model.

The final milled result was informed by consciously manipulating the isoparms, as well as by choosing different mill bits and varying the step sizes of the milling path. The jagging and rippling of the surface created reinforcement ribs in the panel’s structure.

 The problem of panelization was also explored in the production of Gradient Scale. The object, twenty feet long and five feet wide, was produced in three segments. Instead of forming straight, rectangular pieces, the cuts follow the model’s isoparms, creating puzzle-like joints. Because the joints follow the NURBS’s geometry, their formal appearance matches the entire project’s language.

Book Reference:

Digital Fabrications Architectural and Material Techniques by Lisa Iwamoto 
https://amzn.to/3Gt0s2u

Digital Origami
University of Technology, Sydney/Chris Bosse, 2007

Exterior rendering of design

Rendering showing nesting of two module types

Interior rendering

Unfolded modules

Individual modules waiting for assembly on-site

Module, second type

Assembly

laser-cut modules from recycled cardboard.

Completed installation.

Book Reference:

Digital Fabrications Architectural and Material Techniques by Lisa Iwamoto 
https://amzn.to/3Gt0s2u

“Housing in Vienna”

SPAN, 2007–8

This “pod family” was designed for the traveling exhibition “Housing in Vienna.” It demonstrates a clear evolution of the pod as it includes the creation of limbs evolving out of the shell-shaped system. Just three surfaces build up one pod.

The pod form is derived from the Cairo tessellation, whose inherent geometry allows it to repeat in multiple ways, thus creating manifold possibilities for assembling the exhibition in various given environments without compromising the overall appearance of the design.

Three shells form single pod.

Mobile-exhibition “colony of pods.”

Illumination tests with vacuum-formed prototype.

Illumination tests with vacuum-formed prototype.

Book Reference:

Digital Fabrications Architectural and Material Techniques by Lisa Iwamoto 
https://amzn.to/3Gt0s2u

 How to create efficient architecture structures through Biomimicry ? (Web / tension structures)

The bowl and doily spider’s dining arrangements

Webs built by spiders have inspired a number of modern architects and engineers. Their forms range from the commonplace webs created by household spiders to the remarkably architectural tension structures of the grass spider (genus Agelenopsis) and the bizarre constructions of the bowl and doily spider (Frontinella communis) and the female bauble spider (Achaearanea globispira).

Web made by the grass spider – a tension surface spread over grass ‘masts’

Arguably, there is no greater champion of tension structures than the German architect and engineer Frei Otto (1925–2015). He pioneered cable-net buildings and, through the Institute for Lightweight Structures that he established, published 32 volumes on structural design principles from nature.

Comparing spider webs with cable-net structures, which are apparently very similar, reveals the gap that exists between biological manufacturing and our engineering: the relatively large sizing of the cables and the very visible connections being obvious differences.

However, this is a gap that is narrowing all the time and, as we develop more sophisticated materials manufacturing and adaptive structures, we should be able to get closer to the elegant arachnid exemplars.

House of the female bauble spider, apparently under the influence of Bruce Goff

The West German Pavilion at Expo 1967, Montreal by Frei Otto – perhaps the closest we have come to the elegance of spiders’ webs

The most common form of tension structure is a cable net, which generally involves a series of guyed masts from which the web is suspended.

Tokyo Olympic Gymnasium by Kenzo Tange – a distinctive form created with just two masts and all the remaining primary structural elements being tension cables

The Eden Project Dry Tropics Biome by Grimshaw. The scheme aimed to maximise light levels inside by using a ring beam to stretch a minimal web of cables over the growing area

Book Reference:

Biomimicry in Architecture by Pawlyn, Michael
https://amzn.to/3GgvxGy

Close-up photograph of a sea urchin skeleton showing its porous and lightweight structure

Whereas bamboo is a relatively pure embodiment of tubular structural engineering, bones are more complex. Bones frequently reveal ways in which asymmetrical forces are resolved. 

What we see is a precise match between the density of bone filaments and the concentration of stresses; where there is high stress, there is a proliferation of material and elsewhere there is a void.

Diagram showing the lines of stress passing through a bone

X-ray through a bone showing the arrangement of bony trabeculae

As biological mathematician D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s seminal 1917 book On Growth and Form documented, the vulture’s metacarpal is identical to a Warren truss. The vulture is an extreme case, where intense selective pressure to achieve high strength with minimal weight yields impressive results. 

As a result of intense selective pressure for lightness, some birds have evolved remarkably efficient structural forms, like this vulture’s metacarpal, which is effectively identical to a Warren truss

Birds in general have evolved in response to intense selective pressure on weight, with different species showing various expressions of the ‘materials are expensive and shape is cheap’ maxim.

Avian skulls, such as those of crows and magpies, are little short of engineering miracles. The effective thickness of the skull is increased while weight is decreased. The structure is similar to a space-frame in which two layers of structural members are connected with struts and ties. The bird skull goes one step further in forming a dome shape, with the associated efficiency benefits.

Section through the skull of a magpie showing thin domes of bone connected together with struts and ties

It’s an astounding combination of shell action with space-frame technology – and all in a humble magpie. This principle was the inspiration for a canopy structure designed by architect Andres Harris.

Canopy structure designed by architect Andres Harris, using the same structural principles as those found in bird skulls

The design resulted from a detailed understanding of the way in which bone tissue forms around pressurised cells, creating air voids between solid surfaces. The potential exists to construct the canopy in a way that is very similar to nature: using a web of inflated void formers, around which suitable materials could be cast.

Skeletons have been a source of inspiration for architects ever since Thompson demonstrated the parallels between structures such as the Forth Road Bridge and the form of dorsal vertebrae found in a horse.

Biomorphic exuberance in the Milwaukee Art Museum by Santiago Calatrava

Close-up photograph of a sea urchin skeleton showing its porous and lightweight structure

The Doughnut House by Future Systems – biomorphic rather than biomimetic

Landesgartenschau Exhibition Hall at the University of Stuttgart – made from interlocking plywood panels based on the structure of a sea urchin skeleton

Close-up photographs showing the remarkable structure of sea urchin spines

The carapace of the boxfish Acanthostracion polygonius showing its amazingly geometric arrangement of scutes

Diagram of the scutes that form the boxfish carapace showing the arrangement of reinforcing ribs

The glass sponge Euplectella aspergillum, made from silica at ambient temperature and pressure with five or more levels of hierarchy

Illustration showing how the glass sponge is assembled from a complex arrangement of intersecting, cross-shaped spicules

Magnified image of the filter plate that stiffens the top of a glass sponge

Scanning electron microscope views of the fibrilar spicules that anchor the glass sponge in soft sediments. Above the sea bed the spicules are smooth, while below they are barbed and have a complex holdfast at the termination