VIDAL RESEARCH BLOG

[mas-studio]

A Mind-Blowing Dome Made by 6,500 Computer-Guided Silkworms

(Photo by Steven Keating)

Your eyes are not deceiving you: The Silk Pavillion — an architectural experiment constructed at MIT, was “3-D printed” using 6,500 live silkworms. Humans have been breeding silkworms for fabric for over 5,000 years, but Media Lab professor Neri Oxman married their innate productivity with computerized efficiency. Oxman leads the Media Lab’s Mediated Matter group — a research team that experiments with advanced design and fabrication technologies with an eye towards biomimicry. Her diverse body of work includes the development of micro-sized robots that can build concrete structures as well as 3-D printed, high-fashion garments inspired by biological structures. (Wired)

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Woodskin: The Flexible Timber Skin

Have you ever wanted to create delicate, complex shapes from plywood, but can’t because it’s too stiff and unforgiving? Well all that might soon change, thanks to Milan-based design studio MammaFotogramma. They have created a type of flexible, ‘Woodskin‘ triangular tiles of Russian plywood.

Woodskin originated from a submission the studio made to open source design competition, Autoprogettazione 2.0. Inspired by the potential they saw in the material, team-members Giulio Masotti and Gianluca Lo Presti incorporated the material into the design of a rock-climbing gym in Montreal, which they were working on. However, while the material was there in concept, the exact manufacturing technique had still to be worked out. To do this, the two moved to Montreal and lived near the site of the gym, so they could experiment with different materials and compounds to perfect the design. The result is a sheet of Russian plywood, routed into a series of a series of triangular tiles, held together by a vinyl mesh.

[cineraria]

MIT Architecture on Vimeo

[personalfactory]

BIOSTAGOG - interactive installation by BRIDGE and PLATIGE IMAGE

[research-blog]

LGG Research Projects in Architectural Geometry (by lggepfl)

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Basque Health Department Headquarters Coll-Barreu Arquitectos

The site is located in the crossroad of two important streets of the Ensanche neighborhood, designed in 1862. The restrictive city rules compel to repeat the shape of the neighboring walls, reducing penthouses according to a curved directive, chamfering the corner and building a tower on it. The folded façade generates multiple visual directions from inside to the streets bellow, and also from the highest floors to the landscape that surrounds the city, a highly effective mechanism for the incorporation of urban vitality inside the building.

[enochliew]

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Russian pavilion by TOTEMENT | PAPER Bureau

12 irregularly shaped towers in white, red and gold and a 15m tall central building dubbed the ‘civilization cube’ which links them.

[artpartner]

Busan Cinema Center / Busan International Film Festival by COOP HIMMELB(L)AU. The basic concept of this project was the discourse about the overlapping of open and closed spaces and of public and private areas. While the movie theaters are located in a mountain-like building, the Center’s public space is shared between an outdoor cinema and a huge public space which is called Red Carpet Area – i.e. reception area. The Red Carpet Area is actually three-dimensional: across a ramp which leads along a double cone the guests of honour reach the reception hall. Each of the two areas is overarched by a huge roof, one of them measuring 60×120 meters – the size of a soccer field – and cantilevering 85 meters. The Busan Cinema Center – A multifunctional urban plaza COOP HIMMELBAU’s design for the Busan Cinema Center and home of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) provides a new intersection between public space, cultural programs, entertainment, technology and architecture creating a vibrant landmark within the urban landscape. LED saturated outdoor roof elements acting as a virtual sky connect building-objects and plaza-zones into a continuous, multifunctional public urban space. Media, technology, entertainment and leisure are merged in an open-architecture of changeable and tailored event experiences. The result is a responsive and changing space of flows acting as an urban catalyst for cultural exchange and transformation.

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The D-Shape printer, created by Enrico Dini, is capable of printing a two-story building, complete with rooms, stairs, pipes, and partitions. Using nothing but sand and an inorganic binding compound, the resulting material has the same durability as reinforced concrete with the look of marble. The building process takes approximately a fourth of the time as traditional buildings, as long as it sticks to rounded structures, and can be built without specialist knowledge or skill sets.

[studioalexandracarr]

http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/1794-Introducing-the-20-legged-3D-Printed-Strandbeest-Animaris-Geneticus-Ondularis.html?ca=email&ct=1129&cr=02

[personalfactory]

“Ultralight 3D-printed beams could bear heavy loads

The “spongy” bone found near joints is strong but light. Yong Mao of the University of Nottingham, UK and colleagues discovered that this fractal patterns that is self-similar on all length scales can be used to help in building highly efficient load-bearing structures. Engineers reduce the mass by using a hierarchical design, where the same sparse patterns appear at different length scales. One example is the Eiffel Tower which is a big metal rod made up of smaller metal rods.(…)

A drawback from 3D printing is that imperfections could cause serious problems. “Even a small imperfection at a local scale could have a large impact as there is no extra material that could take the added stress and maybe that is why this kind of fabrication has not been practical to date,” explains Mao to PhysicsWorld.”

~ 3ders.org

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Building Bytes: Brian Peters’ 3D Printed Ceramic Bricks Can be Used in Large-Scale Construction

Brian Peters, co-founder of Amsterdam-based Design Lab Workshop, has been working with 3D printers for many years now, so he knows how use then to make just about anything—even building blocks for construction. Through a six-week residency program at the European Ceramic Work Centre, Peters developed a series of 3D printed ceramic bricks that can be used to build walls and custom structures. The result of his work—Building Bytes— is a system that uses portable 3D printers to operate as on-site brick factories for large-scale construction. Peters debuted his work earlier this week at Dutch Design Week.

By Bridgette Meinhold

[nparametric]

[hhkfour]

‘ekko’ by thilo frank

[prostheticknowledge]

Windswept by Charles Sowers 

Art installation fixed outside a gallery’s wall, displaying natural flow and turbulence of the wind - via dezeen:

Hundreds of spinning blades reveal the invisible patterns of the wind in American artist Charles Sowers’ kinetic installation on the facade of the Randall Museum in San Francisco.

The installation, titled Windswept, consists of 612 rotating aluminium weather vanes mounted on an outside wall. As gusts of wind hit the wall, the aluminium blades spin not as one but independently, indicating the localised flow of the wind and the way it interacts with the building.

“Our ordinary experience of wind is as a solitary sample point of a very large invisible phenomenon,” said Sowers. “Windswept is a kind of large sensor array that samples the wind at its point of interaction with the Randall Museum building and reveals the complexity and structure of that interaction.”

You can find out more at Dezeen here, with photos and a video of the work in action.

[industrialist]

Incognito Concrete Illuminators. An attempt to combine the power switch and lighting in a meaningful element of interior lighting. Remaining flush against the wall when not in use, the lights need only a simple touch to pop out. 

Designer: Povilas Danius

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[research-blog]

Povilas Danius

http://dadanius.com/design/power-switch-light/