MACHINIC MORPHOLOGIES

3DScan architecture cinema 4d redshift sciarc Zbrush

Fall 2022

Beginning with an analog exploration of shoe geometry and sneaker culture, this project culminates in a narrative structure merging the analog models with a digital, machine-imbued language. Focusing on new ways of working and generating narrative and formal responses, this project speculates on how digital workflows can be leveraged in order to quickly iterate on formal arrangements.

The project itself is a fictional elementary school project that focuses on generating a new contextual response. By creating a parasitic object interfacing with the sloping landscape, the project capitalized on mew programmatic moments through these narrative structures. Also, the interior classrooms of the mass serve as vignettes, highlighting new ways in which this reality impacts the educational experience of the school.

'Gotta Have It'

Starting from the idea of sneaker culture and consumerist tendencies, these models were created to explore the way in which these cultural values shift contemporary paradigms. As a formal study, the constituent shoe elements were deconstructed and then collaged into larger objects. The moments in these models were seen as analogies, looking at ways in which these loose material conglomerates can inform a new reading on the way shoes and the body operate.

Tryptic

After 3D scanning these newly constructed artifacts, their formal and geometric qualities were used to create vignetted classroom spaces. These spatial scenarios were initially explored as a new way of creating architectural moments from complex, almost non sequitur geometries. The insertion of a larger mechanical infrastructure substrate begins to create a more ordered/codified geometric quality. Programmatically, the intersection of these scenarios and the technological substrates yields fun ways of thinking about the contemporary learning environment.

Also, the residual consumerist attitudes that were present in the models that created these spaces permeate the project. Artifacts of the shoes' brands become ornamentation and spatial indicators, finding themselves codified into a new architecture.

"Checks over stripes..."

Machinic Moments

The narrative of the shoe morphology and mechanical elements permeates even the furniture design of the classroom elements. The use of these mechanical elements throughout the project began to create a school imbued with a simultaneously ornamental and functional infrastructure. As this system interacts with the spaces at different scales and in different ways, the pipe system can become circulation, railing, workshop systems, and geometric noise. The way the pipes are articulated references the way shoes are indoctrinated into modern culture. As elements that blurring the idea of ornamentation and performative schemas, shoes are universal symbols of status, expression, innovation, and modest functionality. In the same way, the residual mechanical infrastructure of the project appears as typical elements that begin to expand the way people use and think about space. As a living system within the building, this substrate becomes its own organism driving the way people work around it.