Module 2: SynopsisLuke Dempsey

638407ENVS1000816/4/2013 Coral Pattern

Weekly Readings

Thomas Heatherwick

Heatherwick fails to see a difference between architect, designer and sculptor. This is evident in all of his projects, especially the Bleigiessen sculpture. The Bleigiessen sculpture is a multi-storey sculpture existing of 150 000 golfball-sized glass beads suspended on high tensile thin wires. This sculpture is a prime example to how Heatherwick uses design to create spatial effects. The overall mon-strosity of the sculpture is overwhelming but also the fine detail also creates a sense of fragility and incredible detail. The sheer scale of the sculpture makes the viewers feel small in comparison, this large piece in the middle of a building ironically makes the building seem larger and more spacious than without the sculpture because of this dwarfing effect.

Lost in Parameter Space?

This reading focuses on how models are abstract representations of reality and continues on to how they are applied in a CAD form without unnecessary arbitrary information to distract from the intended form.

Models are an expression of infinitely complex real world concepts reduced to a ‘level where it can be described with manageable effort’. Abstraction is the process of creating the model with the least amount of complexity as possible to, as previously men-tioned, avoid distractions of arbitrary detail. Reduction is finding the best, most efficient way to represent the model in terms of information. It is done by eliminating redundancies and optimising the descriptions of the model. It is about eliminating informa-tion that ‘increases the weight of the model without adding detail’

So therefore abstraction is creating the model in a simpler form and reduction is eliminating unnecessary information which have to overall effect on the model to create a more efficient representation of the concept.

Thomas Heatherwick’s Seed Cathedral, Shanghai

Orthographic Photographs and Slices

One square on the background grid is 10mm x 10mm

Primary Digitised Model Secondary Digitised Model Alternative #1

Using panelling tools, the surface was divided into a grid of points. A 3D custom pat-tern was made using the below recipe and this is what made the panels have the shape that is evident in the model (immedi-ately left).

It still need finetuning, especial-ly around the top of the lantern. But this is the most satisfying re-sult out of the 4. This is because it most closely replicates the pattern of the coral, the whole aim of the project.

I dont like the top of this design however, the surfaces intersect too much and are messy

The sections of the clay model were scanned and then transferred as 2D sections which were then lofted. This made a terrible looking model (below), so instead a new model was made from variouso transformations to a primi-tive cylinder surface until it looked near-identical to the clay model.

Lofting Models

Top View of Primary Model

Front View of Primary Model

Panelling Pattern

Model #1

Secondary Digitised Model Alternative #2

This shape was created with a higher density pattern which is closed-faced. Meaning that there are no holes into the middle of the lantern. This will create the inner glow effect rather than the outer shadow effect (as dis-cussed in the previous module).

This is quite a nice looking form, but it doesn’t represent coral as much as I would like it to, more a pineapple pat-tern. It is also inpractical to work with due to its complexity

The base pattern of this model is as below:

At the base of the form, the panels were curving which would make for an inaccurate result after unrolling the faces, cutting them, and then assembling them again. Therefore the NURBS surfaces were converted to mesh and then triangulated so that the surfaces were planar, not curved (as illustrated below)

After:

Before:

Panelling PatternModel #2

Alternative #1 continued..

Secondary Digitised Model Alternative #3

The third design is a modification of the second design. The second design’s pattern is too dense to be practical and would be too much work/too fiddly. This uses the same pattern but is scaled up by a factor of 2.

The effect of this is a square-faced compartmentalisation of the cells. I am not sure I like this. I believe this is the result of few grid points and a large base pattern, meaning there is a low number of iterations.

This still only loosely resembles coral and is still messy at the top of the form.

Model #3

Panelling Pattern

Secondary Digitised Model Alternative #4

The fourth design incorperates a much simpler design of a ta-pered box with a hollow top as the base pattern for the model.

This effect will create exte-rior shadows in a box/diamond shape radiating outwards from the centre of the lantern.

I like especially how this de-sign performs at the top of the lantern; where all of the other designs fell short as a result of messy intersecting surfaces. Maybe the final result can be a hybrid of the top of this form and the bottom of a different pattern in the future if another is found to be more desirable (more on this later).

Model #4

Panelling Pattern

Lighting Effects

Lighting is very important to the lantern, apart from the obvious as it is after all a lantern, but also because it gives an atmosphere - a mood.

There will be three different arrangements that we will be looking at the effects of lighting on.

Only a row of the pattern was chosen for a lighting prototype because that is all that is need to get a sense of what the lighting effect will be like.

The first arrangement is the pattern off of the Digital-ised Model Alternative #1. When lit, the model emits a symmetrical shadow which resembles a star. I quite like this one.

The second arrangement is a row taken from the Digitised Model Alternative #4.

The hollowed boxes cast quite a nice shadow radiat-ing outwards.

Because the pattern isn’t as interlinked as the previous one, it feels a lot more flimsy and can easily be mistakenly deformed (as visible in the top right image).

Top View #1

Isometric

Panelling Pattern

Panelling Pattern

Lighting Effects Continued

Here I experimented with different paper weights and the lighting effects that they produce. The ‘skeleton’ of this pattern from form #1 was made using 120 GSM paper while the inside ‘holes’ of the cells were filled with 50 GSM paper, letting light leak through it more easily than that of the skel-eton. This creates the ‘internal glow’ effect previously mentioned and evident in the Beijing National Aquatics Centre.

Beijing Aquatic Centre

This effect will be amplified when using the card-cutter’s 250 GSM paper which will let minimal light through the ‘skeleton’ so the holes will practically be the only source of light. However, with this effect comes a trade-off. When the holes are covered with the 50 GSM paper, the shadow cast becomes very dull. The main attraction of the shadow is the hexagonal holes that it casts, with those holes covered it is very faint.

Form with 50 GSM paper covering ‘holes’

Design Hybridisation

As with the constructions of ‘things’, the lantern can be build by assembling smaller blocks into one “super-block“ (Lecture 3/16/2013).

I have considered how this can work with my lantern. In the main design that I like the most (Design #1) and with most of the other designs, the pattern is perfectly fine around the base up until the neck, this is where it gets messy. With the Design #4 the neck and head of the form where clean and aesthetic but the rest was quite boring. So I thought that the two ‘components’ could be combined into a ‘superblock’ as illustrated with the construction of steamliners and airplanes etc.

Opposite is a rough hybrid model with pat-terns #1 & #4.

Hybrid Design Model

Model #4

Model #1