SCREEN DUMP

Screen, Mesh, Trellis, Latticework ... there are many words to choose from.  Wikipedia gives at least 10 alternate spellings for Mashrabiya.  And there are overlapping ideas involved:  porosity, privacy, sun-filter, air-flow.  Perhaps it's all about ambiguity.

Any architect who has worked in the Middle East has tried to reinvent the lattice at some point, find a fresh interpretation, out-brize-soleil le corbusier.  So the question arises, "how to adapt the mashrabiya to an adaptive curtain panel".

 

Curtain panels by pattern are by definition adaptive.  They fit themselves to the shape available.  Actually even conventional curtain panel families do this, but only within the constraints of a planar rectangle.  Panels by pattern have to adapt to all manner of distortions including twisting.  The approach to creating geometry is therefore quite different.

Take a square grid.  You can host points on the 4 ref lines that define the boundaries.  Positioning these at 0.7 & 0.3 will approximate an octagon.  Join Points in pairs.  Spline by point.  You can develop a simple mesh that bends and twists to fit curved surfaces.

Then play with the geometry, maybe introduce some curves by connecting 3 points.

Nothing very spectacular, but you have to start somewhere.

 

SLUG IT OUT

I've had this at the back of my mind for a couple of weeks now.  Panellise a double curvature surface, use Excel to randomise heights & or angles of curtain panels.  Could be interesting.

The surface is inspired by something Zach did a while back.  Create a torus on an inclined plane and cut most of it away with a big void.  You're left with something that looks a bit like a slug. 

On the positive side, you get rows of panels that are the same size, which has to be good for buildability.  First thought for the panel was a pyramid.  I set it up so the height offset was an instance parameter.  Then I ran Revit Excel Link from within the mass family to generate some randomness.  I went for 5 different sizes.  Now it looks like a crocodile.

But give the panel family some framing and the camera views from ground level start to look interesting.

Lots of spiky goodness going on.

Just for a change, I spent a while practicing my curtain panel by pattern skills. 

Did a bit of reverse engineering on some stuff I downloaded couple of years ago and explored various lumpy &/or twisted versions. 

Now you may say that I'm just playing around, which of course I am.  But it's surprising how often the stuff you were "just playing around with" one weekend inspires some real work a couple of weeks later.

I've been reading Jacob Bronowski's  "Ascent of Man".  It was a TV series about 40 years ago.  He was a serious Mathematician with a passion for the humanities.  I was taken by this quote.  "all science, all human thought, is a form of play.  Abstract thought is the neoteny of the intellect, by which man is able to carry out activities which have no immediate goal ... in order to prepare himself for long term strategies and plans." 

Thing is, although I'm being playful, there is a method to my madness.  I'm exploring an area that I know has a lot of potential.  Building up a store of useful memories. 

 

 

 

 

COUGH COUGH

This is just a quick taster.  Have been working on curtain panel by pattern techniques.  Decided to revisit Zach's coffer dome which is still available here

http://buildz.blogspot.com/2009/09/hi-ho-coffer-dome.html

The panels themselves are quite tedious to build, which is probably why he speeded it up and set it to Lone Ranger music.  There's a lot of hosting points on the workplane of another point and giving them an offset parameter.  This is the key to seamless panels and keeping geometry of panels normal to the surface.

For my dome I also used "by intersect" to create the latitude grids.  So that the intervals can get smaller towards the top, keep them squarish in proportion.  Played around with a void sweep and a blend to vary the coffer profile a bit.

It's part of a learning process.  I also made a barrel vault and set up reference planes at wonky angles for the "by intersect" grids.  This makes the coffers taper which I suppose might have an application somewhere, one day.