4th May 2015 Tutorials

Hello everyone, here are couple pictures from our last tutorial showing some of the best future cities that our students are currently working on in response to the Brief03:FutureCities.

From an open-source green city living in symbiosis with the Amazonian forest to a terra-forming city on Mars made from 3d printing robots carrying giant Fresnel lenses all the way to a rent-for-advertisement growing infrastructure covered with LED screens – we are look forward to discovering with you the cities of tomorrow from our wonderful and creative DS10 students next Thursday at the Interim Crit.

Joe Leach’s green city, built in harmony with the Amazonian forest, based on an open-source catalogue of beautiful curved wooden trusses

Alex Berciu’s Cellular Automata city providing an 3d Printed infrastructure for the people

Diana Raican’s Fractal City on the rising sea provides protection from Tsunami and a gradation between private and communal spaces.

Garius Iu’s inflatable curved origami city recycles the ocean’s plastic patches while providing a playful shelter on the rising seas.

Diana Raican’s Fractal City on the rising sea provides protection from Tsunami and a gradation between private and communal spaces.

Lianne clarke’s growing pixel city offers reduced rent for advertisement campaigns and provides LED clad cubes connected together with a plug-in cross system.

Diana Raican’s Fractal City on the rising sea provides protection from Tsunami and a gradation between private and communal spaces.

Lianne clarke’s growing pixel city offers reduced rent for advertisement campaigns and provides LED clad cubes connected together with a plug-in cross system.

Vlad Ignatescu is terra-forming mars with 3d printing robots that solidify sand dunes using giant fresnel lenses.

 

 

FUN-tegrity

Physical Manifestation of FUN-Tegrity Pavillion

“All Structures, properly understand, from solar system to the atom, are tensegrity structures. Universe is omnitensional tensegrity”, Buckminster Fuller described the tensegrity structure. With the concept of “Fun Circus: Playground in the desert” , the Fun-tegrity Pavillion is a shelter that offers fun and also leisure with the idea of fun palace in the middle of the dead desert – redefining oasis. Flexible, stable and tuneable of membrane tensegrity are advantages to create the fun and leisure based installation and give more means rather than only harps in spaces. The pavilion will capture the essence of dynamic characteristics of the tensegrity structures, by decomposing and altering the basic module of the tensegrity model. This pavilion will has three main functions, which are for shelter, leisure and as a playground . The membrane of the structure will provide shelter from the hot burning sun , and in between the poles of the compression members, hammocks can be installed to provide individual leisure space. On top of the modules combined , there’ll be a trampoline installation, as the playground, where people can jump on it .

It will act as social intervention based on circus arts performances among the strangers and nomad in in the desert, a place where they communicate , have fun and share their talent. With the selected materials , of white membranes, it will contradict with the surrounding site , gracefully prevail in the middle of the dessert .

This year’s theme is about mirrors and masks, mazes and merger. It will be a kind of magic show that takes the form of an old-fashioned carnival. This Carnival of Mirrors asks three essential questions: within our media-saturated world, where prod- ucts and people, consumption and communion morph into an endlessly diverting spectacle, who is the trickster, who is being tricked, and how might we discover who we really are?

Classic carnivals, as theaters of illusion, upheld a very strict dividing line that separated carnies, cast as showmen, from mem- bers of a naïve public who were labeled chumps and suckers, marks and rubes. Our carnival, however, will perform an even more subversive trick — its motto is Include the Rube. The wall dividing the observer from observed will disappear, as by an act of magic; through the alchemy of interaction, everyone at once can be the carny and the fool.

Social Interaction 

There had been tensegrity installation before in the history of burning man . But there is no one that people can jump on it . So why not ? People will have fun and express themselves. There will be other smaller modules for other people to be used as shelters . That is the beauty of tensegrity structures . They are flexible and tuneable. This pavilion would not be merely as shelter. In fact, they can play with it or on it ! Fragments of spaces inside of the tensegrity structures, will create some social pods where strangers can hang out and exchanging their creative thoughts . But the most important thing, it will bring people together .

this entry can be access through this student’s website as well ESHAHASHIM©

ORBIT

Narrative | ‘Orbit’, an aluminium tube pavilion stands as a playful take on the orbit of our solar system. A kinetic, inhabitable architectural structure that orbits around itself revealing a central, occupiable space that acts as a ‘center of the universe’  location within which the occupier will experience the rest of the world rotate around them.

Occupiers act as planets orbiting around one another, taking in the beautiful surroundings as each hammock level gently rotates as if it is floating, free from visible connections below, In order to reach these relaxing levels, the occupiers must scale its lightweight structure eventually reaching the central ‘ritualistic’ epicenter.

Physical Description | Orbit stands as a playfully abstract vision of the universes orbit around the sun. Visually the structure is very simple. A series of single recursively scaled down forms provide both the frame work in which to house multiple levels of hammock space to relax whilst also offering a highly structural climbing frame that is scaled in order to reach its epicentre.  It stands tall amongst its neighbours as a combination of both inhabitable architecture and a visually striking art piece.

The structure is composed of multiple interlocking aluminium tubes of varying diameter that hang from a single point supported by the main outer structural framework.  Within the opening at the bottom of each frame is space for hammock netting to be fitted to the aluminium tubing providing an inhabitable space to relax on.

The inset neon LED lighting on the inside of the aluminium tube frame enhances the proposals visual impact at night, illuminating to be seen from near and afar.

Interactivity | There are multiple levels for potential seating, each incorporating a hammock like mesh suspended between the aluminium structure. This provides a comfortable place to relax whilst the structure gently rotates about its axis. As with most exciting Burning Man installations, this structure is climbable with the final point to reach being the central frame large enough for one person to sit in whilst the rest of the structure rotates around them.

Near Unison | Dan Dodds | Kinetica Art Fair 2013

Near Unison, my project exploring harmonographic traces is currently being shown at Kinetica Art Fair. The exhibition is in Ambika P3, the exhibition space attached to the University of Westminster on Marylebone Road. For more information on the exhibition, and details about tickets and opening times please visit the Kinetica Art Fair website.

The exhibit features a prototype of the interactive harmonograph swings that could form part of the larger installation proposed for Burning Man Festival, along with casts of the harmonographic traces left in sand, and photographic work documenting the process.

“The 5th Kinetica Art Fair returns February 28th – March 3rd 2013 at Ambika P3, as one of London’s annual landmark art exhibitions and a permanent fixture in the Art Fair calendar, renowned as the UK’s only art fair dedicated to kinetic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and new media art.

Kinetica is hosting the work of over 45 galleries and art organisations nationally and internationally, with representatives from UK, France, Russia, USA, Poland, Holland, Spain, Italy, Hungary, Indonesia and Japan, collectively showing over 400 works of art.

A huge interactive light sculpture from Dutch artist Titia Ex will greet visitors as they enter the impressive Ambika P3 venue, and giant 3D sculptures from Holotronica will hover above the main space of the Fair. Other highlights include an exoskeleton hybrid of mananimal-machine by Christiann Zwanniken; a giant three dimensional zoetrope by Greg Barsamian; and a life-size ‘Galloping Horse’ made of light by Remi Brun”

Kinetica Art Fair Press Release

NEAR UNISON | Burning Man Festival | Black Rock Desert

NEAR UNISON is an installation that allows participants to visualize the harmonic relationships between them. Pairs of sit-on pendulum swings create several large scale harmonographs that scratch drawings onto the surface of the Black Rock Playa. The structure that holds these harmonographs is itself a physical representation of a harmonographic form that can be seen from a distance across the Black Rock Playa.

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The harmonograph was a 19th century machine that was invented to explore the geometry of sine waves. It was soon developed into a popular parlour room toy that was capable of producing beautiful and delicate drawings simply by mapping the relationship between two swinging pendulums. By changing the lengths of the pendulums, their wavelength and oscillating frequency are changed. When the ratio of these two frequencies is something complex like 35:73, there is no discernible pattern, but as soon as it hits a simple ratio such as 3:5 or 2:3 a clear pattern emerges. The relationship between visual harmony and mathematical ratio is exactly the same those found in musical harmonies: the ratios that produce beautiful drawings are the same as produce harmonious musical chords.

The title ‘NEAR UNISON’ is derived from the set of patterns that occur when the ratio of the two pendulums is very close to 1:1, as will occur when people of a similar weight are using the interactive harmonograph. It is expected that the patterns produced by these interactive harmonographs will describe, in an abstracted manner, the similarity of all human beings, while emphasizing the subtle differences between individuals.

The overall form of the structure is also derived from a 3D harmonographic surface with a ratio that is in this ‘near unison’ region. A plywood structure supports pipes that trace the harmonographic lines through space to create a delicately curved sculptural form that sits directly on the Playa. Suspended from this structure are a series of connected pendulums that participants are able to ride like swings. When they are are used, these pendulums trace harmonographic patterns onto the surface of Playa. The drawings that are created will map the interaction between pairs of participants.

For more infomation please visit www.dandodds.co.uk

Burning Man Retreat

The Green Line

A saltwater greenhouse refugee camp on the Egypt/Israel border

FULL DUNE CREST POURING

The culmination of the crest pouring and component diversion technique… The pouring of a full dune in RealFlow to create the superstructure of the building. On the south facade large components create circular openings in the structure which are able to house fresnel concentration lenses. On the north facade smaller components create a thickened bottom edge to diffuse light back into the interior space.

Cosmogony

Cosmogony, as in the coming into existence, is a network of collaboration and participation in the city of burning man. Cosmogony is based on 50 000 components (10 variations of them) which will be given to 50 000 burners and their interaction will enable the social phenomenon of participation. People have their own freedom to make their own creations. Creative participation is the only constraint to make this project work.

People receive one single component with their ticket to the festival. The project is enabled only when the people intermingle with each other. The assembly process can be interesting and fun. It also invites curiosity. It’s manipulation does not always indicate any particular use or any specific location. The beauty of the potential structure(s) is that no one knows where it will appear, it isn’t organized and it just grows. What is suggested is the direct interaction of humans.

A manual of directions for possible structures to be made will be given to burners as a start point. A variety of scales, from a chair, to a bed, to a dancing platform to a mega structure. The aim of this project regardless of one’s physical capabilities, skills, interests or geographical location is to engage in the creation of a mega structure by adding their component to it. A structure made by everyone that belongs to everyone. The assembly process is fast and unpredictable as the human’s creativity cannot be controlled . A series of experiments for the potentials of the manipulation of this system was tested by inviting a several people to create forms out of these components. The bigger scale will be tested in burning man city.

When the festival will be over, the burners will be able to disassemble the structure and take their components back home.

You can follow the blog at: http://burningmanproject.wordpress.com/

TETRA

TETRA is an installation that exploits the potential of mass participation to create a form that emerges from the interactions of hundreds of people with the construction system over a number of days.

Inspired by the work of R. Buckminster Fuller into space-packing polyhedra, it explores the unique three dimensional geometrical properties of the regular tetrahedron and related ‘tetrahelices’ [also known Boerdijk–Coxeter Helices]. Their geometries provide an invisible framework for the participants to work within. The modular tetrahedral construction system will be used by the participants to create forms that automatically diverge from one another.

These in turn provide spaces separated from other participants for individuals to pause and reflect on the location and nature of their surroundings. TETRA’s position out on the edge of Black Rock City means that once the structure starts to take shape, participants will be able to climb to positions that afford views across the city. Just as Burning Man asks participants to take a step back from the consumer capitalism, so TETRA allows participants to step back and view Black Rock City as a whole

TETRA is a modular kit of parts that are assembled by participants into a structure that changes form over the course of the festival. There are 160 modules, each one a tetrahedron made from four equilateral triangle shaped pieces of CNC cut exterior plywood. Each triangular face has a hole cut from its centre which, as well as decreasing the overall weight of the module, allows the modules to become rungs in a structure that can be climbed up, on, in and through.

The ply edges of the four plywood triangles are bound together with rope to ensure a joint that can transmit loads in tension from one sheet of ply to the adjacent two. There are pre-drilled re-enforced holes near each vertex to allow for adjacent modules to be bolted together with bolts and wing-nuts by participants.

Each module is designed for one person to carry while climbing sections of the structure already built. The participants are able to climb any of the structure that is already built, and bolt their new module onto the existing structure. Once built, participants are able to climb up, select a module to remove and move to another place. This means that the overall form is not set by the designer, but emerges from the collective desires of a large group of participants.

Because of the intrinsic geometry of tetrahedra and tetrahelices, the form will always contain diverging branches with inhabitable spaces within them.