so, it's roughly 36 hours before I'm scheduled to lasercut my final model, and I think i've finally got something...

over the course of the studio, i've been torn between two different lines of inquiry... 1) folded floor plates and 2) facade patterning. I've been trying for weeks to get the two to jibe...



the folded plates (precedent? Paul Virilio's "The Oblique Function" from Architecture Principe? Koolhaas's Jussieu Library?) grew out of a desire to define program areas through geometry... for example, the auditorium can be a kind of Roman theater, created by the folds and creases in the plate... public and private areas can be defined by their relative ceiling heights, etc, and so most of the floor levels can remain fairly open... i'll have to go back in and put up some partitions, no doubt, but they can be a secondary system, the fold is the Big Concept...



initially, i wanted the folded plates to come out of some kind of pattern that could work in plan, section, and elevation... but I abandoned this after a few failed attempts... and focused my attention on the facade, which was to be a kind of briese-soleil based on this pattern, even if the floor plates had somehow lost it:




not getting anywhere great with the facade patterning (seemed to be generating complexity for the sake of complexity) i went back to the floor plates... double checked my program areas, identified the connections to the ground, view lines and general organization, and re-did the folds...



this was yesterday...

this morning I came in with a renewed drive to make the facade patterning work with the floor plates.... i wanted to take HdM's Prada Tokyo and do it one better... in the store, several of the diamond shapes of the facade are extruded through the volume of the building... this kind of merging of facade pattern, structure, and interior volume is what i hope to achieve in this project...

i started out back on the facade side, this time writing a Grasshopper definition in Rhino to generate a pattern of octagons and squares (a riff on traditional arabic patterning) that could be affected by two attractor points, thus creating a gradient effect from one side of the building to the other... i wasn't sure exactly why i wanted to do this, but it was a good excecise...




later, i realized that if this pattern was tweaked intelligently, it could be used to extrude interior volumes that would actually work... for example where the large auditorium sits, the facade consists almost entirely of diamonds, angled at an appropriate rake for seating... where the black box theater is required, the facade has turned from octagons have to rectangles, allowing for a flat floor and vertical walls.... all floor plates can be extruded from this facade pattern, and the result is the type of folded plate i was already working with....



so this final image is the current state of it.... i haven't gone through and extruded all the floors, but you should be able to see how it will work....

next steps -
-tweak the gradient
-extrude the floor plates
-extrude the facade pattern

with that done tomorrow i should have enough to cut the final physical model... then afterwards i'll generate the plans and sections, diagrams, and renderings/collages..... all by pens-down on tuesday night? we'll see....


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more here...
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so, i'm pleased with it so far... it's really starting to come together, and i think my geometry is doing a lot for me.

unfortunately, this was supposed to be a program-based studio....