This is a project completed at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with collaborators Anne Stack and Qinrong Liu. We coaxed this form out of a flat landscape to articulate a quadrangulated amphitheater. I modeled the vibrations of a circular membrane using Bessel functions. This I converted into a PQ mesh, which we quadrangulated according to the following rule: moving along spiraling "strips" towards the center of the structure, select the same three vertices for each quad to define a plane. The fourth vertex is then raised or lowered to meet this plane, thus adding two additional triangles to the mesh as shown.
Modeled in MatLab, adjusted in Rhinoceros 3D, and rendered with VRAY.
I find it interesting to note, that although this is in fact modelled with a standing wave, the positioning of the oculus (an emergent feature of this design), implies directionality and therefore dynamism, as though a wave is rolling across an open landscape.
