Vascular Strata

Team: Marjan Colletti, Andreas Körner

2022/2023

The Yokohama Ferry Terminal building by Foreign Office Architects was designed in 1995 and built in 2002. It has been an icon of digital architecture, embodying computation paradigms, smoothness, and fluidity. Now, almost three decades later, the studio invites students to rethink those paradigms. While the movement of passengers through the building was a form-giving parameter for the terminal, it was also an analogy to the flow of water. In this studio, students will investigate fluidity as something dynamic, erratic, and seasonally changing. Rather than building hydrodynamic shapes, we will explore how water makes its way through matter. We will investigate this erosive process as a tool to program space horizontally, vertically, and over varying stretches of time.

While the before-mentioned example of architecture focused on humans and their interactions, this studio is concerned with ecological considerations around wildness, materials, and seasons. The resulting architectures are vascular (alive, succulent, and thick) and striated (layered, folded, textured). The first term picks up the organic and biological analogies that are so often the source of inspiration for architects. The latter honours our current ecological epoch, the Anthropocene, as a time when we are increasingly aware of our imprint on climate and terrain.

In this design studio, students are asked to develop design strategies and apply them to building design. The methods are fluid dynamics simulations, volumetric modelling, and texture mapping. The three tools will be used to investigate a series of questions. How can we organise space through material distribution and resolution? How can simulation outputs be used to generate volumes and mass for architecture? How can we design an architecture that operates differently across seasons?

Furthermore, the studio will continuously evaluate the designs through three lenses: