Kao Ting-Chun(Gene Kao)

Portfolio

2011 TKU CCC Studio project

Digital Architecture & Environments

Animal Housing in City

Animal Housing Step 1

Content

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30-43

44-47

48-51

52-55

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60-69

12-17

18-23

24-29

Step 2

Step 3

01-pupa

02-Ant Nest

03-Honeycomb

04-Spider

Web

Minimal surface method study

Inbatit the forest like insects?

SPIRITUAL(church)

MOVE(path)

LIVE(tree house)

Site

EAT(fishing house)

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Animal HousingMany worms, such as silk worm, produce thin threads. I focused on the silk shape between two branches. They have some tension in them, so the shape is not straight. By dividing the front and back surface we can generate the solid in or-der to represent pupa in a human scale.

Ants create their mazes not using eyes. Instead, they use a special sense to

make sure of the direction. They store foods for winter, and they build amazing

caves by team work. They are all good architects, so we can mimic their spe-cial way of making their nest, or home.

2011 TKU CCC Studio project - Gene Kao

01-pupa

02-Ant Nest

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Bees biuld their nest by using many sym-metrical geometric units, and they keep repeated them until they become a very strong structure. Such as modules in certain architectural methods. I tried to study their geometry then create units and repeat them so I can get cre-ate honeycomb structures.

Spiders use patterns to build their webs. They seperate the space, whether it is a voronoi or not. This kind of creature divids the 3 Dimension space by using its own method, so I tried to find a way to difine the field of space through mathematics Voronio.

03-Honeycomb

04-Spider

Web

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01-pupa

Bulge & Blend Diagram

Cutting Process

Perspective view

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Transparent and Opacity

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Slices

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All 3D exploded segement show the surface change grdually. so the pillar-like silk is shown from 0 to 16.

All Explosive Segments

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Detail

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Explosive Surface

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solid is created from surface. Therefore, whenever the surface have back and front, we should analye them seperately.

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02-Ant Nest

Maze Diagram

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This is 3D maze. The more deleted pieces, the more ways we can go. Like digging a hole, we do not build the wall. Instead, we take out some pieces so we get a lot of spaces and pathes. A 3 Dimensional maze is more complecated than a 2 dimentional maze. Through careful caculation, a 3d maze has 2/3 more choices than a 2d maze. So It can be more complex. Furthermore, some dead end path can be a store room for ants, or per-haps for humans.

This persepective view show the nega-tive space

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Slices Cutting Process

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Explosive Drawing

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Front View

Perspective View

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03-Honeycomb

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Two dimension extrude surface can produce a unit like space. Another way is through mirror and rotate geometry method.

repeated unit

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Process

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From unit to surface

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Slices

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Explosive Drawing

Cutting Process

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04-Spider Web

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I Created some paths then divided them, using those nodes to create patterns. And we can no-tice different divisions can create differnt shapes.

Path Making & Voronoi Rules

Voronio 2D Diagram

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05 06 07

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Cutting Pieces Top, Left, Right, Bottom

Cutting Pieces Middle Segments

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Spider Web on Acrylic

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Explosive Drawing

3D Voronio Pattern + Spider Web Patterns

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Animal Housing in City

Combining those design concepts, I found minimal surface system has a lot of things to do with my project- Animal Housing. Such as ”repeated-units” or “bounding boxes.” So I am trying to find a system to which I can apply my methods, so the pavilion-like architecture can be param-eterized.

Minimal surface method study

cubic honeycomb

Bitruncated cubic honeycomb

Hyperbolic honey-combs

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There are many ways to define the continuity surface. The first one is to create a spiral, trim them and mirror them so we can get a weird topological geometry, which is not easy to imag-ine through our brians and drawing by our hands. the picture below shows my analysis on the mini-mal surface using grasshopper, and reparametriz-ing the definitions. The pictures on the left show many reflections, Therefore It’s not easy to recognize their fun-damental shapes at first glimpse.

spliting surface

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Units & Morphology study

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A Method which can be used to All Kinds

of Geometries

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The best way to find our sym-metric surface is to find the geometric centre and con-nect it to the surface centre. The diagram below shows how I create the difinition be-tween formal geometry boxes. However, This method can not only be applied to symmet-ric shape but also to organic brep boxes. Furthermore, I can quickly and easily create many 3 Dimensional spaces or surfaces only finding closed boxes. Then they can naturally be transformed to organic-like spaces.

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Voronoi is a good way to define a brep in the space through points. First I used surface like a path to increase the points on space then re-cieve voronio boxes. Then using our method to create a parametrized suface as a pavilion. I can transform the closed boxes into organic caves just like animals create their housing.

Pavilion in Boxes & Furniture

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44 Should we live like animals,

should we behave like insects,

should we take response to those who inhabit the earth like us.

should we respect them.

should we know our limits, and learn things from the nature?

Inbatit the forest like insects?

45Site

Beside Hongshulin Station, the site is the largest area of Mangrove swamp in Taiwan. The swamp connect to the Taipei river, and the site filled with many huge area forests.

We propose a question if it is possible for human to live in the forest like insects and get some feed back from our environments.

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The concept of our four different proposals are directly from the beginning four concepts,

which change by animal behavior of habitat. Tree house from spider web, fishing house from honeycomb, ant-nest became our path, and pupa turns into church. Why these four ideas? It’s

represent EAT(fishing house), LIVE(tree house), MOVE(path), SPIRITUAL(church). Those are funda-

mental things in live.

According to the Bible, people spoke the same language until they wanted to build the Babel

Tower. In order to overcome nature.

It’s also famous for play-ing kayak as picture on the left.

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EAT(fishing house)

Diagram

Honeycomb geometry normally be noticed through facade 2d geometries. Fishing houses represent our working spaces. The diagram above show ty-pology and morphology in parametric methods.

Finally, fishing house used inflatable materiel and shape becoming movable housing for poor.

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Morphology

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LIVE(tree house)

This picture shows the result from applying minimal surface method into 3D voronoi boxes, so perpendicular boxes became more organic, more like natural tree house.

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The diagram below show how points generate box-es. From line-like to curve-like boxes gradually show simply rules effect the idealistic model to realistic one.

Diagram & Process

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In the forest and nature, not only the form be organic but also the rule, which generate the

form, behind does matter. By controlling those rules, we might know how

the environment works and look like. At the end, we might know how to adapt to na-

ture.

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MOVE(path)

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Explosive View

Diadram

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SPIRITUAL(church)

Looking through all the tribe societies, they all have spiritual spaces, such as churches and temples. The reason is we, human beings, all know we are limited. Comparing to the universe and those physical worlds, we know little thing about ourselves. Therefore, spiritual spaces can become a tower, which is very high and take care of others.

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Method 1

Method 2

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Method 3

Method 4

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Method 5

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Method 6

The process-es show how grids effect the position of pillar and dorm. Moreo-ver, sev-eral scotland grids on dif-ferent posi-tions help the boxes became to different shapes. At the end, or-ganic methods reborn the boxes.

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