Concept
By looking at biological and botanical life for ideas that can be exported to architecture—branching, membranes, photosynthesis, leaf phyllotaxis, aesthetics, etc.—an agenda of design concepts can be proposed that simulates desirable properties found in nature for deployment in building. Material scientists are looking to a process called biomimetic investigation where researchers look to natural forms of life and organic elements—shells, fish, bacteria, plants, animals, spiders, etc.—for properties such as hardness, lightness, strength, softness, stickiness, etc., to extract for new materials and new ways of manufacturing. My project uses some of the tactics involved in biomimetics for application to architecture and applies the extrapolated observations to software growth buy viagra online. The project is both conceptual and hypothetical yet physically buildable buy cheap viagra.

The Software
Xfrog is not an architectural program—technically it is a hybrid software using icons and a modified version of botanic-generating algorithms called L-systems to digitally grow plants and trees cheap cialis online. With the collaboration of the software developers I have, over the last year, used Xfrog for this project to “digitally grow” architectural elements in an experimental vein but with a view to actually using the results in a built project buy cialis online.

Since Xfrog was not intended for this type of design work I extrapolate from it and import its files into other software programs after a form is grown viagra online. Specifically, Xfrog mesh-files are converted to NURBS surfaces in Rhino and from Rhino, developed and further exported in stereolithography file formats for CAM-model building or 3D solid object printing or, for rendering, to 3D Studio MAX buy cialis.

One Project, Three Steps
sIn order to manage the potential scale of such a project I have outlined a process that uses three building elements that can each be considered in physical and theoretical terms—structure, volumetric space, and skin (membrane). From these three basic architectural elements I have experimented in order to begin a series of design “growths” that could each be used in different ways and at different scales cialis online.

1, A/B. Growing Structure (branches)
A branching structure was begun in Xfrog as a root system and as it progressed it became apparent to me that it would function better as branches so I inverted the file and removed two for the four initial branches generic cialis. With a basic tree I began to experiment with different growth parameters available in Xfrog—variables like phototropism, gravitropism, number of faces, etc.—and used these variables until a digital growth was realized that branched upward, exhibited prismatic facets (loosely like Gothic tracery), and was highly asymmetrical within an apparent symmetry. My intention was to create not only a column that could be used in various ways but to also create a structural armature that could be used without the tree-trunk as a central, structural armature (illustrated supporting floors that initially were grown from the branches).

2. Growing Space (seed pods)
Having used growth parameters to create the “Gothic” profile within an Xfrog tree for the column, I realized that other types of more geometric, more spatial manipulations were possible so iterated, nested, and distorted platonic solids became my focus in an attempt to grow crystal-like grouped spaces. And to support such a growth in a geometric armature, in this case what look like spider legs cheap cialis. As the renderings and the Thermojet model demonstrate, this process produces a massed-system of interconnecting geometries that with further articulation could be seen as a building cheap cialis online.

3. Growing Surface (leaves as monocoques)
The third experiment, after the development of pod-spaces and the tree column, was to grow a leaf that could be articulated or multiplied for a canopy or roof segment; additionally it could join the tree as an object within a grown design lexicon. The initial impulse for this came from an intention to collaborate with a Barcelona-based architect on a competition entry for a civic project in Pontecagnano, Sicily. While our collaboration did not move beyond primary stages, I held onto an aspect of the competition-brief to develop a large plaza and worked to generate a repeating leaf-system as a first-phase proposal.
As the illustration makes clear, I literally grew a leafed Xfrog plant of no particular genus. The idea was that a very large, light-weight canopy could be built like an airplane wing, a monocoque, with integral skin and structure—something I have been working on for the last few years in analog models for outdoor canopies; and that the individual leaf-like canopy could then be a repeated module in an irregular truss construction or could use the grown column to support individual units.
While the production of the canopy monocoques could be achieved with a number of advanced production methods using new plastics, resins, metals, or composites—a related design surprise was emerging from the initial renderings, even if production could make a cohesive structural and material unit, renderings were giving two completely different visual accounts of the project. From some vantage points the canopy complex looked like the wings of a bird in flight—or like the sculptural study of flight by Etienne-Jules Marey; yet from several other perspectives the elevation looked like the ruffled botanic leaves of a plant like penstemon. One view was rhythmic even with asymmetrical scale changes; the other bilaterally symmetrical but craggy, almost like an enlarged view of a plant or even an insect. I liked this duality and tried to intensify it, thinking such perspectival changes very much like those found in a garden.

Conclusion
While the canopy monocoque may have direct applications in other projects, its lessons are, without question in my mind, applicable to a design process that is concerned with integrating naturally occurring forms, digital visualization, and CAD-CAM systems for architecture and design and therefore useful as a case study that includes the lessons and techniques derived from the other two segments of the project. For the last image, I have included a view of a root system that brings together all of the above tactics in the biomimetic growth of experimental space—in this image the branching, root system becomes structure, splines from these structural “roots” are used to generate surfaces that encompass space and, finally, the surfaces enclosing the spaces will be transformed into monocoque shells as the project develops.