Daniel Baerlecken

Digital Girih, a Digital Interpretation of Islamic Architecture

The relation between texture, pattern and massing is a fundamental question in architecture. Classical architecture, as Leon Battista Alberti states in De Re Aedificatoria, Book VI, Chapter 2, is developed through massing and structure first; texture is added afterwards to give the bold massing and structure beauty [1]. This hierarchy has of course been challenged throughout architecture history. This paper will provide a different thinking of the relationship of massing and texture in Islamic Architecture from a digital point of view. An analysis of Islamic patterns challenged this relationship in Islamic architecture. Digital design and fabrication methods for a series of studies and an installation were used to respond to the findings of the analysis.

Structural, Deployable Folds — Design and Simulation of Biological Inspired Folded Structures

This paper presents a concept of folding as a form-generator for a structural system that allows the ability to deploy large spanning structures. The presented approach studies the embedded kinetic possibilities of folded structures and focuses on a parametric modeling process that allows structural performance evaluation of different types of the same origami family in order to optimize the geometry for a given scenario. The workflow between scripting based form generation – within Rhinoceros and Excel – and LS-DYNA is presented in detail. Additionally, within the context of an architectural project we discuss the question of scalability from a thin microstructure to a thickened roof structure.

Nominalized Matter: Agency of Material

This paper investigates making as a process that brings together diverse materials and combines their flow in anticipation of what might emerge. Ingold calls this approach the textility of making, which gives priority to the formation of materials as a process, in which form is generated through interventions within fields of forces and currents of materials – not through a predefined notion of an ideal outcome. The approach opposes the Aristotelian hylomorphic approach, which focuses on final products. This paper investigates textiles techniques and their potential for simultaneously creating ornamental and structural systems. This work is conducted through a sequence of architecture design studios, producing the case studies found in this paper. Within the paper different examples of textile systems are introduced ranging from a Semperian approach (wall as dress) to form finding experiments with active textile materials – demonstrating the potential for methods utilizing material agency to inform architectural design.

Ornate Screens – Digital Fabrication

The English word ornament comes from latin ‘ornamentum’ , rooted in ‘ornare’, which can be translated with ‘to give grace to something’. In the past centuries diverse discussions about philosophy and necessity of ornament have formed. Alberti states in De re aedificatoria (1485) that a building is developed through massing and structure first; ornament is added afterwards to give the bold massing and structure ‘pulcritudo′ (beauty) as the noblest and most necessary attribute. Ornamentation serves to increase the ‘pulcritudo′ of a building and to create harmony in the overall intellectual and primary framework. A few hundred years later the critical theories of Adolf Loos (1908) describe ornament as immoral and degenerate –a suppression of the modern society neglecting the modern technologies.