Wave Pavilion by macdowell.tomova

ABBREVIATED PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

The Wave Pavilion acts as both pragmatic and conceptual testing ground, leveraging scripting and advanced digital fabrication toward the expansion of disciplinary modes of design and construction. As an alternative to the oft-explored strategies of sectioning and panelization—the ‘go to’ moves for rationalizing complex form—we propose a new tectonic mode, one in which the architectural vehicle of the Line is explicitly leveraged toward the nuanced description of space.

The clarity of the project’s conceptual impetus relies on the precise fabrication and assembly of its constituent elements: Our prototype CNC rod-bender operates in tandem with a multi-use 7-axis robotic arm to shape the Pavilion’s skeleton of ¼-inch steel rod.

These specialized but versatile tools—along with the scripted communication codes that transform 3D computer geometry into robot /bender choreography—expand the domain of the architect, accelerating the relationship between design and construction. Hereby, the leap from conceptual to built form becomes less one of translation than of direct instantiation; drawing made physical, immediate, and tactile.

Short Video:

http://www.rhinofablab.com/video/macdowelltomova-robotic-cnc

FULL PROJECT DESCRIPTION:

The proliferation of digital fabrication within the discipline of architecture carries the promise of ultimate customization, the built realization of previously untenable forms, and unprecedented fluidity between design and construction. In practice, however, there seems the tendency to exploit only a small fraction of the potential afforded by this technology. As an alternative to the oft-explored strategies of sectioning and panelization—the ‘go to’ moves for rationalizing complex form—we propose a new tectonic mode, one in which the architectural vehicle of the Line is explicitly leveraged toward the nuanced description of space.

Grounded in traditions of drawing, this new morphology rises from a monad of simple linear geometry. This crude but variable base unit, deployed within an assembly via complex relational logics, emerges as more than just Line, instead evoking surface, becoming atmosphere. The Wave Pavilion instantiates these aspirations.

The Pavilion operates as landscape furniture, an occupiable space of gathering and leisure. Set on the grounds of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, the Wave Pavilion serves both a functional role as a place for student discussion groups or private reflection and a didactic one within the dialogue of digital fabrication.

Here, Line is made real in the form of slender steel rod. By a scripted strategy of geometric evolution, the individual members of our line species coalesce into a form-society, one in which the intrinsic behavioral tendencies of the species compound with environmental motivators linked to the spatial and programmatic needs of the project. Gradients of pattern read across the breadth of the Pavilion, but moments of eccentricity—phase shifts, vestigial phenotypes, dormant features—highlight the composite relational processes of the underlying system. Here Line becomes a means of challenging the ubiquity of the Blob within scripted/parametric form-making; geometric composition supplying all the complexity and nuance for which we have become enamored of calculus-dependent design.


Our thanks to Wes McGee, Dave Pigram, and the TCAUP FabLab, without whom the development of this project would not have been possible.

ABOUT MACDOWELL.TOMOVA:

Parke MacDowell, Diana Tomova, and Boriana Tomova form macdowell.tomova, a young design team based in Detroit and Zurich. Contact at .