Assignment 2

DESIGN AND GEOMETRY
In real life practice, architects want to show their interests of geometry uses into their design to compute with the other architectures. In contemporary society, various architects use computational sources to approach their ideas of expressing parametrical geometry into the design. The advantage of computer use in design process is, as the architect wants to control more of parametric control over their design, they just need to navigate some of design variables and which can create different shapes of another design of it. This kind of computational process can enhance the efficiency of the design process which explores design manifestations.
To construct geometry brings challenges for the architectural designer. For the architectural design form, the geometry will be at the very core of the initial conceptual form finding to the more detailed assembly and construction. The Water Cube is the one of the perfect example building which explains the parametric geometry with the complication of the design processes.

With the Beijing National Stadium, known as „Bird‟s Nest‟, one of the Beijing Olympic‟s remarkable architecture is the Beijing National Aquatics Center, which is known as the „Water Cube‟. At the beginning, the design team of PTW Architecs and Arup international engineering group, they wanted to show some differences with the „Bird‟s Nest‟ which was red and round, they started to think of blue and boxy scheme which finally became the primary design of the „Water Cube‟. The main architect of „Water Cube‟, Chris Bosse from PTW Architects started to think of an idea of a box which made of bubble enveloping as a set of swimming pools.
The design is well known as continuous skin for the roof and walls with translucent which make the people to think of „float on water‟. The size of the „Water Cube‟ is 584 squre metres by 102 metres hight which is not an actual cube but a rectangular box. The continuous bubble idea on the roof and the walls continued with circle printing which incised on the floor of the It is quite amazing to show the idea of „Soap Bubble‟ with the precise geometry of a giant box. The form and the pattern were founded in nature „soap bubble‟ and they began to look what happens to their geometry when they congregate each others. Starts with Voronoi diagram idea, through lots of design process of their ideas into the design of the building, finally they found the most efficient way which is dividing space into cells of equal size with the least surface area between them; the designers explored solutions proposed in the late 20th century which is, Weaire and Phelan‟s idea. The team eventually accepted Weaire and Phelan‟s idea and developed the building skin made of cells with either 14 or 12 sides.1 The team also wanted to show this building skin to be random pattern in bubble shape, not repetitiously. Using the Weaire & Phelan‟s geometry idea, the team finally figured out the building‟s exterior skin structure with 4000 ETFE (Ethylene Tetrafluoroethylene) bubbles which were coming with 7 different sizes for the roof and 15 different sizes for the walls. From this building the team tried to capture the spirit of water and they “created a building that not only embodies some of the elusive characteristics of water, but one that tightly integrates skin, structure, and the performance requirements of an Olympic level sports venue”.2 Also they “wanted the building to dematerialize, to change moods, to react to changes in the environment around it”3 With Weaire and Phelan‟s geometry , the design team forms the basis of the structure but it is hard to find the geometry due to the design form finding process. But at the second floor bubble bar, there is pure geometry clearly shown and recognizable which is the only one spot in the „Water Cube‟.4

Also the bubble light is very beautiful as the design. The team used the LEDs, wrapping all around each of the 4000 bubbles of the Water Cube surfaces at night time is amazingly to express the idea of „Water Fluid‟.
Through the study of „Water Cube‟ design and geometry part, and the study of the Assignment 1 on creating my theme of „Snowflakes‟ on Rhino Grasshopper program, I found the relationship with the continuous surface of itself with the parametric design. For the last assignment, I tried with the repeatable shape of the snowflakes with different value which can eligible to change the variables to create new designs. For the next assignment with this Water Cube idea, I would like to challenge and perform the irregular random shapes of the continuous shapes with the value changes.