Cellular Strategy Applied

This post shows the beginnings of an applied strategy based on my thesis research and my work at Smart Geometry 2008. The first Version (below) is a stab at applying the neighborhood script I developed at SG08 to a small residential project: The Solar Decathlon House that we are developing in our advanced design Studio.

Basically unmodified, the braced frame generated by the script is used to support a prefabricated panelization system that takes on different qualities according to its location in the building: solar panels on top, windows on the sides, little feet on the bottom.

Very Basic, however, I have come to the point where I begin to see the strategy clearly. My experience at SG2008 and the resulting algorithm were good inroads into the use of functions, and global variables to handle different tasks, all called by a central script (called “Solid” in the diagram below).

The next step is to reformulate the above strategy for a process that is more specifically aimed at the ideas I am exploring in my Thesis, namely using bottom-up process to manage architectural qualities, in a recursive feedback loop.
The beginnings of such a recursive strategy are shown in the diagram below: an older version that I developed in the beginning of the semester based on Cellular Automata. It will take some more in-depth work to combine all of the previous work into a single method but all the pieces are here. they Just need to be assembled (what am I talking about with all this recursive stuff? please see my latest Abstract, in column at left).