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Swarming Colonies
SWARMING COLONIES is a generative design project and is one of the projects to come out of the DIGITAL ECOLOGY- GENERATIVE CITY workshop tutored by Soomeen Hahm and Hanjun Kim of Studio Soomeen Hahm on PARAMETRIC ARCHITECTURE platform. The project is rooted in a synergy of traditional Indian and Romanian patterns derived from the traditional architecture of both countries. It is envisioned within a dying coniferous forest in a post-apocalyptic world. SWARMING GEOMETRIES. A swarm, by definition, is a large number of animate or inanimate things massed together and usually in motion. This is a very accurate description of the final design generated through the script using our modules. The aggregation of the modules looks as if they are FROZEN IN MOTION. There is a sense of fluidity even though the modules have a simple, basic, rigid geometry. ARCHITECTURE IN VIRTUAL REALITY. Since architecture makes up a vast portion of our real-life environment, it makes sense for it to be highly incorporated into our simulated environments. Creating and exploring incredibly imaginative designs like these often leads them to become a reality sooner or later; more importantly, the process through which the designs are brought to reality is as important as the product itself.
We thought seeing TRADITIONAL elements go through the NON-TRADITIONAL design process would be interesting.
THE PROCESS
1. The units and modules | Inspiration was found in Romanian and Indian traditional patterns. Common elements were observed in patterns from both cultures and thus inspired the team to use traditional architectural elements, process them through non-traditional design methods and observe the resulting design product.
The technical process: the common elements were extracted and worked upon to design a hybrid grid based on quads.
Differentiation of this grid was done by using attractors to obtain public and private spaces after which the typologies and planning arrangements were assigned.
Two simple units were extracted from the grid, and iterations of arrangements were worked out to create the final three modules.
2. Terrain | The next step in the design process was to set the context and generate a terrain that would act as the physical base for module aggregations.
Context: The colonies were to be situated in a dying forest as part of a post-apocalyptic scene, and the terrain would be a mountainous region riddled with ravines. It would be quite a harsh environment and would be an imagination of how the world could be when resources deplete faster than they can ever recover.
The technical process: The terrain was created in Unity 3D using an imported height map and brush modeling to add finer details. This created a custom terrain mesh.
3. Massing generation. The last step in the process was to link/together both the elements i.e. the modules and the terrain, to assemble and orchestrate the colonies.
The modules were integrated with the context(terrain) by assigning a colormap to the terrain.
Multiple colormaps were designed and tested to obtain various swarms out of which the colormap that produced the most organic formation was chosen.>RGB values were tweaked in the BOIDS CITY C# script to differentiate the geometries and produce the massing.
PAACADEMY - Parametric Architecture (parametric-architecture.com)
TEAM: Simina- Ioana Dimcea & Deeksha Basawaraj | 2021
