The Bloom Project, designed by generative tools as one of the projects to come out of the DIGITAL ECOLOGY– GENERATIVE CITY studio workshop by PAACADEMY tutored by Soomeen Hahm and Hanjun Kim. Designed by the talented students, Rachad Salem and Zigiant El Sarkaoui, the project is inspired by biomimicry, and decentralized systems found in nature.
Click here to register and watch the recordings.
Rachad intended the city to blossom around the steep terrain slopes as flower blossoms around its center, using inspiration from biomimicry and decentralized systems seen in nature. In order to construct a digital representation of a flower, he first looked at its structural components. Now, in a bottom-up decentralized system, complex and unexpected patterns might arise at the colony level due to the interaction of several boids agents at the local level. In order to employ them as agents in our scripts, Rachad translated a few of the floral components. The digital flower’s stem served as the primary structure agent, the petals were removed to create secondary structure agents, and the pods were reinvented as our third kind of agent with a range of purposes.
The boids system process was performed by the strong computational tools Unity and C#. Rachad designated the components as agents, instruct them to acquire terrain data, and require them to follow a set of form-finding rules, where local changes in position, size, rotation, and direction are based on information gathered from the environment. He built unified architectural forms using this method of form-finding, where the link between the architecture and its setting emerges after many iterations.
Soomeen Hahm and Hanjun Kim led the studio to teach students how to use C# programming language and Unity gaming software to create an architectural design by thinking about the relationship between the architecture and its context, the program and its environment, the building and the ground through speculating how architecture responds to the changing landscape due to variation of environment. Click here to register and watch the recordings.
Credits:
Studio workshop by: PAACADEMY
Studio title: Digital Ecology – Generative City
Lead by: Soomeen Hahm and Hanjun Kim
Project name: The Bloom Project
Students: Rachad Salem, Zigiant El Sarkaoui
Date: 2nd March until 13th April 2021
