Project Title: Urban Sprawl Condeser

Designers: Sugar Inc. Marc Boles, Kristof Crolla, Giulia Foscari, Arturo Lyon

Project Description: “This proposal is an urban system that condenses sprawl into a three dimensional high-rise network through a radical ground to volume relationship. The aim of this project is to incorporate the way in which cities inherently behave as living organisms in order to allow urban space to emerge,” as listed on the Architectural Association site, written by the designers. Archinect discusses additional works by this team.

Technical Critique: This project is an eye catcher, but it is not surprising since Marc Boles and Kristof Crolla went on to work for Zaha Hadid. Sugar Inc. states that this project is both based on algorithms that combine randomness and environmental forces that drive a new typoloy. Randomness does come through, but I must admit, it is quite elegant. This project looks like string theory, with an occasional influence of DNA strand thrown in. It appears to be modeled in Rhino, as a set of strands that act as the support structure for the system. There is little emphasis on the floors or circulation of the high rise, which I find disconserting, but not to the point of distraction from the point of the project. The people who live here can float up to their spaces, after all, which is quite cool in an imaginary way. I can appreciate that. I like to leave things to the imagination. Who needs circulation when you have so many cool looking strands. This work is unique and the technique is advanced. I would be interested to find out about what algorithms they applied to this computer model that created their effect. I rate this as uber cool despite the fact that the woman in the rendering would be the size of king kong. In this world, I suppose we could all live happlily ever after, though.

The material research is based on Candy Floss which is a lightweight fibrous structure that grows and evolves over time, embodying a three dimensional parcelling system capable of nesting adaptive open architectures.

images from Architectural Association by Sugar Inc.

by lauren taylor white

School: Harvard Design School  

Work: Daniel Forster

Project Statement: Residential buildings have heterogeneous unit types of a heterogeneous level of quality.  Dormitories have homogenous unit types of homogenous level of quality.  What happens you strive to have heterogeneous unit types of a homogenous level of quality? His goal is to “create homogenously “good” units that offer different benefits, ranging from view, light, size, roommates, etc.”

Technical Critique: The lighting acheived by the louvers in this project make for soft and subtle curves that are soothing. The effect of the pieces being pulled from the wall look to be a Rhino effect of nurbs manipulation. The louvers are modeled a foot apart and wrap the building, which is a unique way to shade a building, by covering the building as a wrapper. This theme creates a nice privacy effect for the dorm; a building which typically wouldn’t get much privacy. This effect can be acheived by using the Sweep2 Rail tool. To practice using this type of tool work with this tutorial.