There are several methods of designing, but often they fall into distinct categories of top-down or bottom-up.

Fragments, however, attempts to simultaneously design with both techniques. This is accomplished in a design competition for the new school of architecture on the UCLA campus in Southern California.

Within the school there are specific programmatic needs that need to be assembled and aggregated with certain floor area ratios, here represented as the white shapes protruding, there is also an overall form created aesthetically and by site boundaries, here represented as the glass canopy system.

Using design software, specifically Maya's soft body modeling, both entities, the programmatic blocks and the covering glass panel system are sent on a collision coarse utilizing Maya's animation capabilities. What results are two unique forms competing for the same space which leads to breaking and fragmenting throughout the design. After several simulations a final geometric form is composed to further be refined into a cohesive architectural whole on UCLA's main campus.