Eversince I decided to study architecture, I felt attraction for structural matters and how they could be integrated to a final design. Most of the architectural projects treat design and structure as separate elements and this last has to be adapted to fit in the design most of the times. As far as I conceive architecture, structure should play a significant role in the main piece and should also be attractive enough to contribute to the final outcome.
In search for a theme to research, I decided I would like to go deeper on the understanding of structres. After a few hours of thinking, I found three topics that are interesting to me, all related with the movement and the use of the least possible elements:
1. How could a solid structure open and close to let daylight go in without changing its form too much?
2. What kind of structure should be the most adequate to use in order to create a structure that is self supported?
3. How can a solid structure (such as beams or columns) move to completely change position without decreasing its efficiency during this process and create a new shape?
Hopefully at the end of this period I will find a solution for any of these matters.
Congratulations! - it's great to see that you're able not only to express clearly your interest in a close relationship between architecture and structure, but also to formulate some quite specific research questions already.
ResponderEliminarIn order to take most advantage of this strong start and prepare for your presentation at the next class, please consider how you can rephrase any or all of these questions into hypothesis-and-test forms.
If you'll recall from the introductory lectures, these are something along the lines of:
Hypothesis -
"If I design the what-have-you in whatever way, the result will have such-and-such good characteristics (and avoid such-and-so bad characteristics.)"
Test-
describe how you would produce designs and evaluate whether they do in fact possess the good characteristics you're aiming to achieve
(such as:
- letting in daylight but not changing form too much, or
- being the most adequate*, and also self-supporting, or
- changing position but not decreasing efficiency)
*this term obviously needs to be clarified, right?
If you'd like more feedback on these matters before Monday, please post again tomorrow.
André
Hi Perla,
ResponderEliminaryou have a few areas of interest listed above, at the moment they are still very broad and would benefit from further specification.
Most important in your case is probably a design context to evaluate your proposals in, a multi story building will have very different requirements than a single story pavilion, so try to identify in what type of design you would like to develop your proposal.
With respect to your daylight idea, 1.again it would be necessary to be more specific about shy and how you would like the daylight to enter your building, as in is it important that the solution maintains a watertight envelope, or can it be an actual opening, how fast does this have to occur etc.
2. for the self supporting structure it is also necessary to define a context in which you develop a solution. A structural framework, if it is structural as the name suggests should be self supporting, otherwise it does not seem to make sense to call it the structure, so it is unclear what you mean by this here. If it is about the combination of form of buildings and the structural parts supporting it would be necessary as well to specify what your goal. There are structural shells which minimize material use through compression only geometries for instance by Heinz Isler whcih maybe worth looking at, but such approaches usually work less well if the form intend clashes with the pure structural form. So again - what aspect of this problem area do you propose to study more specifically?
3.There are a few examples of larger scale kinetic structures. You mention that you are particularly interesting in maintaining efficiency of the structure even when the structure reconfigures itself. Another thing is you mention columns and beams. Most precedent kinetic structures work with a form of space frame where the separation into columns and beams based on clearly defined load cases is not as clear, especially if the form changes and the loads change. My question would be, one, is efficiency the most important challenge? Or is the integration of such a kinetic structure in a usable architectural space not more important (as there are so few examples of built kinetic examples- why is that the case)
Overall, each of your 3 proposals could easily become your study project, so you should choose one area and also focus much more on a specific aspect of it, hopefully the comments help