Playing! [discovering and inventing systems]

I drilled a grid of holes in a flat piece of plywood, put dowels in random holes, grabbed thin strips of wood, connected the dowels with the wood strips, and watched what happens! It was very interesting to see how many variations and spacial qualities I can get. The relationship between the distance of the dowels to the curvature the wood strips create is the key I think. I plan on expanding this experiment and move to the three dimensions. What spacial qualities will I discover with introducing a grid of holes in the Z-plane?

Why did I do this? (I’m so glad you asked):

A sailboat hull is designed in way that it performs very efficient in different points of sail. The hull obviously doesn’t change its shape as the force vector changes. All the different conditions and force fields have been calculated and design before making the hull. A site in an architecture problem contains many forces that in some point will act on the building (some good, some not so good). How can we design and make forms for a building with consideration of these force fields present in any given site? In a way, as Greg Lynn says, we can create a dynamic architecture without the the building actually moving.  “Actual movement often involves a mechanical paradigm of multiple discrete positions, whereas virtual movement allows form to occupy a multiplicity of possible positions continuously with the same form.”

The pegs on this grid of holes represent a restrain that needs to be addressed and the wood strips are force vectors and eventually the forms that address those constraints.