A Tectonic Approach for Integrating Kinesis with a Building in the Design Process of Interactive Skins

Today, interactive architecture plays an increasingly important role in urban milieus. However, in terms of design principles and guidelines in the age of digital architecture, the design and construction of interactive skins has been under-explored. A new design approach to integrate interactive skins and architecture is needed. Certainly skins with interactive and kinetic properties need to be designed and constructed with a new approach for physical and content integration, instead of the traditional design approach. Thus, the ultimate objective of this study is to formulate a suitable design method in order to integrate kinesis with a building. Furthermore, this research aims to establish effective tectonics for interactive skins through the exploration of different state-of-the-art interactive skins. For this study, according to essential design factors that come from the definition of interactive architecture, such as interaction, display, and content, interactive skins are classified in order to build up controllable, available design parameters of interactive skins. This study also proposes designing an effective tectonic model for the integration of kinesis with a building through in-depth case studies. Moreover, in order to prove the viability of these proposed models, this research provides a prototype of a multi-agent-based interactive skin system using Delta robot kinematics, by which designers can quickly design and effectively simulate feasible interactive skins.

Care. Emerging Natures

Pieter Versteegh

The work addresses research by design as a subject and a method. It explores theorizations, experimentations, and verifications, all of them engaged in writing, drawing and building. It is discovery-led, and starts from a blurry "state of the arts". It oscillates between architectural processes, products and performance without considering any of them isolated as research. Its relevance emerges. It is the design process that constructs, delimits the research corpus and produces architectural insight and knowledge. The first part addresses architectural meaning. It engages interdisciplinary connections: structuralism in linguistics and philosophy, color theory, and a displacement into deconstruction. It concludes that, although an architectural design process can deliberately try to produce and uphold determinate architectural meaning, such (objective) meaning is immediately deviated, notably by the appearance of architectural usages, scale, and possibilities of appropriation. The second part investigates deviation as a substantial part of architectural creation. If noise is irreducible, it must also structure architectural creation. It connects to domains resisting to reductionist thought: complexity sciences, literary critics, archaeological processes, and theorizations dealing with the secondary such as psychoanalysis and gender studies. The work is marked by a dilemma related to empowerment: the originality and authenticity of design and its delivery at a certain moment always seem to prohibit inhabitation, appropriation. The secondary, subject to dominant, single authorship, becomes primary. Architecture seems resistant to modernity in the Kantian sense. The work re-centers on psychiatry, gender studies and (health) care: the understanding of natures rather than appearance, structure or essence. In the third part, it moves from the production of difference to inscriptions of memories and future possibilities; from design as making to design as the initiation and care of a shared transformation process, accompaniment of differance. The understanding of architectural reality shifts from the finality of object to a process beyond control, co-construction between different authors/users occurring in minor events, in a very local and specific context. The work proposes a design process driven by care, encounter of authors and users in quality, accompanying different and specific emerging natures of (territorial) identity.

EPFL2012

Optimization of an acoustic leaky-wave antenna based on acoustic metamaterial

Sami Driss Karkar, Hervé Lissek, Seyyed Hussein Seyyed Esfahlani

In recent years, an increasing number of pioneering studies have been carried out in the field of acoustic metamaterials, following the path of electromagnetic metamaterials. These artificial engineered materials are designed in such a way so as to achieve new macroscopic properties, like negative refraction, that are not readily present in nature. While the design and the fabrication of these artificial materials is a hot topic among scientists in different fields of physics such as photonic, electromagnetic, acoustic and recently mechanic, an important part of the scientific research is now oriented towards the identification of actual applications for these structures. As the novel idea of metamaterial was first developed in the electromagnetic realm and for the microwave frequency range, it is somehow more mature in these fields than in acoustics. Metamaterial applications are now widely developed in electromagnetics especially for the design of new antenna. Among other examples, metamaterial concepts are aiming at reducing the coupling between two adjacent radiating elements of the array and increasing the operating bandwidth of radiating elements. It is also used for phase compensation in microwave transistors, and many more applications are rising in the recent literature. In year 2009, in analogy with electromagnetic transmission line metamaterial, our group proposed a concept of acoustic transmission line metamaterial, consisting of a waveguide periodically loaded with membranes along the duct, and transverse open channels (denoted “stubs”). Based on our proposed structure and in analogy with applications of transmission line electromagnetic metamaterials, researchers proposed the idea of an acoustic counterpart to the “backward wave antenna”. These antennas or radiating devices have a very special property such that the radiation angle or the directivity changes with the frequency. In this article, a comprehensive, step by step, design methodology for acoustic backward wave antenna is presented. For this purpose we use the model proposed in our 2009 publication for acoustic transmission line metamaterial, but we focus the discussion on the optimization of the antenna performance. We also propose some closed form formulas for the practical design of such devices, and a formal validation of the structure is proposed using Comsol Multiphysics.

2013

Sustainable Architecture for Educational Space in Africa and China

Ning Liu

Countries in the Global South are producing the most important educational needs of the 21st century. Fast-growing cities can provide the most striking examples of these current tendencies. Just over a decade after the start of the new millennium, the needs for quality-education and appropriate learning space are huge. Yet they are still largely underestimated in many countries of the Global South. With high-level demographical growth and fast-expanding urban boundaries, the developing metropolis provides a fascinating place to analyze societal mutations. School â as one of the fundamental institutions in modern society â deserves timely observation and careful analysis. The research work is dedicated to the study of educational architecture in two African cities Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) and Cape Town (South Africa) and one Chinese city: Hangzhou. Because of the fundamental relationship between school and society, learning places need to make statement of their urban positions. The hypothesis proposes to question the concept of sustainability in the framework of cultural-environmental qualities between school and city, between users and space. Conducted by an architect, this thesis is the synthesis of a research process together with the professional practice. It is benchmarked by a path of three steps: critical analysis of literature, in situ case-study and cross-cultural comparison with proposal of an assessment method that opens up for future perspectives. The thesis argues that the current time is crucial for our society to reconsider the place of educational architecture in the city. A truly sustainable architecture is transformable in the time-span of its usage and transformative in the changing urban environment. With a discursive comparative view between built cases located in these three cities, this work attempts to provide new insights on the design of the learning space in the urban future. The synthesis provides a panel of cultural-environmental quality profiles as guidelines to future design innovation opportunities.

EPFL2015