CLARUS OBSCURUS*
WALL WITH A HOLE
*clarus obscurus:(latin,17th century)
chiaro: Italian, from chiaro ‘clear, bright’ + oscuro: ‘dark, obscure’
METU Architecture | 2018 | Digital Design Studio
Design Team: Ömer Faruk Ağırsoy, Melih Gündüz, Elif Akdam
Instructors: Arzu Gönenç Sorguç, Emre Erkal, Müge Kruşa Yemişçioğlu, Fırat Özgenel
Wall is the distinction and threshold between separate environments, contrasting issues and conflicting ideas. The aim of the project is to generate a wall with a hole to provoke this reciprocal relationship with nature-informed computational design and fabrication methods. The project starts with the hypothetical definition of wall and hole. These two opposite terms are utilized as a tool for the transformation and mutation of the wall. The living organism, which is selected as a sea urchin in this project, used as a model and processor for the design and fabrication process. To better understand the sea urchin, its anatomy, growth patterns, behaviour, symmetrical morphology, generation phases, form, structural layout, geometry, development and evolution was analyzed carefully in macro, meso, and micro scales. The characteristics and behaviours of sea urchins are cross related with wall and hole definitions in the mutation matrix to generate parametric design principles for the formal and typological transformations of the wall. For the fabrication stage, this algorithmic design required different fabrication techniques combined to produce an alternative definition for the wall and hole. Multiple fabrication techniques (laser cutting, 3d printing, sewing) and different materials (plexiglass, polyamide, bristol, snell) are used and combined to produce different parts of the design work in relationship with each other for one of the states of mutating form to create an alternative definition for the wall with a hole.
