Trabeculae is the result of re-imagining the central atrium office
tower. Replacing the traditional operation of repetitive extrusion, a
heliotrope branching system actively seeks out those areas within the
zoning envelope with greatest access to daylight. Forking and swelling
in response to varying light conditions the atrium is thus conceived as a
site-specific network that traverses intelligently and freely from one
façade to another. The atrium becomes the defining element of
differentiation within otherwise normative floor plates while
maintaining efficient floor space ratios.
Within the atrium a second order proliferation of the same system at a
finer scale develops a structural meshwork. The swellings and
coagulations of this topologically free structural
network-within-a-network accommodate meeting rooms and bridges.
The ambition of achieving inorganic speciation is part of
Supermanoeuvre’s broader research into the capacity of generative
architectural methodologies to negotiate novel spatial, formal and
material organizations. Whereby, the performance and character of
architecture is elaborated through both the internal systemic logics of
the algorithm and its motivated response to external stimuli and latent
conditions.
In the Trabeculae tower, the algorithm represents a potential for
difference. A highly complex network of response and decision making
mechanisms capable of engendering spatial and formal differentiation
through multiple levels of internal and environmental feedback and
negotiation. In this regard, the architectural project is no longer
regarded as a passive entity, but rather a typologically-free machine of
multiple possibilities more akin to the morphogenesis of an organism.
Where within the system, the very construction of architecture;
position, scale, displacement, density, thickness, and length are not
only embedded, but more critically become discretely informed by local
environmental sampling.
Designed by architects
Dave Pigram, Iain Maxwell, Brad Rothenberg, and Ezio Blasetti
