Digital Media: Environmental Geometries

Environmental Geometries investigates techniques for visualizing and designing interactively with hard-to-see environmental forces. This iteration of the class focuses on the geometry of air movement.

Air moves like an invisible ocean around and within buildings in response to differences in pressure. This motion can be described mathematically, but solving these equations in each situation remains a challenging and evolving problem. Ultimately, depicting and understanding a complex phenomenon requires more than one model and more than one mode of inquiry, as well as awareness of each specific model’s limitations.

There must be a space of interactive architectural experimentation with environmental forces, between general principles, like hot air rises, on the one hand, and computational fluid dynamics on the other, accurate enough to allow realistic feedback, but fast and loose enough for iterative conceptual study. This course tries to create such a space between design-play and engineering through empirical study.

This class proposes a back-and-forth process between physical and digital simulations. We will build two physical simulators: a wind tunnel for the simulation of wind-driven ventilation and a salt-water tank for the simulation of buoyancy driven ventilation. We will pair these with two digital simulations: a smoke simulation in Houdini and a fluid simulation developed within the course in C# in Rhino’s grasshopper environment. 
Students will experience the friction between the digital and the physical modes and engage with both as flexible approximations of reality. This exploration will be expanded with three additional topics: discussion of the heuristic principles of air movement, the mathematics of air models, and historical examples of design before air conditioning.

Architects are familiar with material experimentation with visible materials. Students don’t need to become carpenters or masons, but they do need methods to explore, experiment, test and fail, with wood or stone, in order to use them creatively in their designs. By analogy, students need methods of experimenting with the invisible material of air, if they are to gain familiarity with its behavior and consider it in their future work.

Alongside the construction of the simulators, students will design a series of models for each simulation and run parallel tests in the computational and physical simulators. Through comparisons, they will develop a formal lexicon for producing specific conditions in the air. In the interaction between two distinct ways of looking at the world, students can discover discrepancies, gain control over tools, and learn when and where to apply different types of analysis.