Colective Housing Prototype

This is just a prototype for our current school assignement involving collective housing (~80+ apartments + commercial and community spaces).

We are using the excellent space-partitioning properties of the Voronoi algorithm to create a lattice of interior and exterior courtyards that progressively make a transition from public space to semi-public, semi-private, and, in the end private space. This way we propose the creation of a coherent urban lattice encouraging interaction with the busy city outside while in the same time offering various degrees of protection/”cosiness”. We are not proposing a new type of urban tissue in itself, but merely adapting and reinterpreting some qualities of sponaneous developement and local tradition(“fundatura”) in a flexible (yet highly accurate) digital framework.

As I was saying at the begging of the post, this is just a technical showdown – everything you see rendered above is far from what the end product will probably be  (since also the way the assignement was formulated forms that evade from some general bar-variation are quite difficult to fit in the judging criteria). Yet it indeed demonstrates the versatility of parametric/generative architecture and the capabilities of the digital framework proposed to control and manipulate with accuracy all aspects of the project (from raw geometry and algorithm to technical: floor height, floor areas, built/unbuilt ratio, sun exposure and so on – the possibility to expand the definition to apartment level details is definitively there).

That above graphic  is a watered down version of the grasshopper definition (I will not release it under any license for now).

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 7:01 pm. It is filed under architecture and tagged with architecture, collective housing, grasshopper, parametric, parametric architecture, portfolio, project. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.