Composite Bodies

CCA Advanced Studio, Spring 2010
Andrew

Final Review Images

The Final Review for the Composite Bodies Studio was held on April 23, 2010. The jury members included:

Thom Faulders (Faulders Studio)
Brian Healy (Brian Healy Architects)
Rod Hemni (HKIT Architects)
Konrad Graser (SHoP Architects)
Jason Kelly Johnson (Future Cities Lab)
Evan Levelle (FRONT, inc.)
Jeff Kock (FRONT, inc.)
Bill Kreysler (Kreysler & Associates)
Chris Perry (SERVO)

Miguel Fisac Facade in Sevilla


Centro Cultural, Castilblanco de los Arroyos (Sevilla, 2000) by Migeul Fisac)

Night Garden

Check out this great research seminar and commissioned project by Ronald Rael and his students at Berkeley. Using CNC milled plaster, slipcast porcelain forms were fabricated. The first part of the project explored the possibilities of this technique in relation to tiling patterns while the second part of the project focused on the installation of the Night Garden, a wall composed of LED lights, water-filled vessels, and porcelain tiles. The Night Garden is a commissioned work by Rael San Fratello Architects and installed at DesCours in New Orleans.

Project Credits
Project Date: 2009
Project Team: Rael San Fratello Architects: Ronald Rael, Virginia San Fratello; University of California Architecture Graduate Students: Christopher Dehenzel, Yes Duffy, Natalia Echeverri, John Faichney, Timothy Kim, Magic Kwan, Kin Lam, Qingyue Li, Adriana Navarro-Sertich, Matthew Smith; Ceramics Lab Technician: Ehren Tool; Ceramics Professor: Richard Shaw; Architecture Shop Superintendent: Paul Morrison; Architecture Shop Technician: Chris Lesnett

YJP Administrative Center by HHD_FUN

Interesting use of a limited set of components. Only 6 different forms (12 when mirrored) were used to produce this facade for a office building in Binhai near Tianjin, China.

Spanish Pavilion by FOA

FOA created this seemingly irregular hexagonal tiling by simply shifting some of the internal vertices of groups of 8 tiles. By coloring the tiles in various colors, this further breaks up the underlaying regular pattern.

Villa Nurbs by Cloud 9

Source

Quasi Bricks

Quasi Bricks by Olafur Eliasson

Obayashi House

Obayashi House by Ando and Eliasson

This was an interesting collaboration between the architect architect Tadao Ando and artist Olafur Eliasson. The courtyard walls are covered with a hexagonal tiling of faceted mirrored tiles. Each tile can be rotated to vary the directionality of the mirrored tiles. Read more about their Obayashi House here. The faceted tiles are based on an earlier series of project by Eliasson called Quasi Bricks.

Taprats Software

Taprats is a great little java applet that explores Islamic tiling patterns. It can export to EPS format so it is easy to bring vector data into Rhino, Illustrator, or other programs. The firm Ruy|Klein has used the software on their “Ornamentation / Computation” research project. Download the application here.

Patterns in Islamic Art Website

Here’s a great website that documents over 4000 examples of patterns in Islamic art and architecture. Photos can be browsed by country of origin, material, etc. There is also a good history and overview of the use of patterns in Islamic art and architecture.

Girih Tiles

From Wikipedia:

Girih tiles are a set of five tiles that were used in the creation of tiling patterns for decoration of buildings in Islamic architecture. They are known to have been used since about the year 1200 and their arrangements found significant improvement starting with the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan in Iran built in 1453.

The five shapes of the tiles are:

* a regular decagon with ten interior angles of 144°;
* an elongated (irregular convex) hexagon with interior angles of 72°, 144°, 144°, 72°, 144°, 144°;
* a bow tie (non-convex hexagon) with interior angles of 72°, 72°, 216°, 72°, 72°, 216°;
* a rhombus with interior angles of 72°, 108°, 72°, 108°; and
* a regular pentagon with five interior angles of 108°.

All sides of these figures have the same length; and all their angles are multiples of 36° (π/5). All of them, except the pentagon, have bilateral (reflection) symmetry through two perpendicular lines. Some have additional symmetries. Specifically, the decagon has tenfold rotational symmetry (rotation by 36°); and the pentagon has fivefold rotational symmetry (rotation by 72°).

Google images of the Darb-i Imam shrine.

FOA’s Ravensbourne School

Here are a few images and links to Foreign Office Architect‘s Ravensbourne School project in London. Alejandro Zaera Polo lectured about this project when he was at CCA in the Fall of 2009. The facade uses a variation of Roger Penrose‘s aperiodic pentagonal tiling (aka “Penrose Tiling“) to produce a differentiated field of openings in the facade.

More info at BDonline.