Vat Grown Home

Math and architecture go hand in hand. Scale, proportion and ratio turn into the shapes and spaces we inhabit. The orientation of your home to the sun, lots of math. The stretching & shrinking of the glass windows in your office building, loads of math. Even your stairs, the risers and treads calculated to best fit the available space and your comfort (and expectations.) For an architect, there’s no escaping math. The architect’s gift is the ability to make it attractive while still retaining the engineering sensibilities. What happens when that architect is also a mathematician?

From A New Kind of Building?, Maurice Martel “was interested in generating architectural structures subject to spatial constraints (such as a given area in which they need to fit).” So he “settled on a project in which he would run 2D cellular automata on irregular grids determined by arbitrary polygons.” His ultimate goal was to design an actual 3D structure.

Using Mathematica he was able to go from this:

To this:

I think what’s interesting is just how benign the result of the Mathematica-assisted design process. Give certain architects free reign, no restrictions and no context and you could very well end up with more folly than form (or function.)

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.