CEILING CLOUD

The focus of the cloud has been on “designed assemblies” and the use of parametric software that works within Rhino. The project was to design the Jury Space within the new Student Services Center in the Architecture Building. The students developed a Ceiling Cloud that is proposed to clip on to an modified suspended ceiling grid using lightweight folded aluminum panels that are designed to incrementally change dimension and drape into the space below. Constraints and variables within the parametric models allowed for the extraction of 150 unique panels that are also perforated with their own individual pattern. The goal of the variations in the overall ceiling system are to disburse and dissipate sound through refraction and absorption created by the corrugation in the panels and their perforation. The gradient of holes also are calibrated to allow more light to penetrate in the center of the space away from the walls which will be lit with exhibition wall armature lighting. The crit walls respond to the overall materiality of the space using homosote in an endgrain orientation that will be CNC routed and laminated with a steel substructure.

First Place, AAFAB Award 2009, Interior Category

Press+Pleat+Peel
This site-specific work installed in Peel Gallery is just one instance of the infinite possible configurations of an expandable architectural system. These “integers of construction” were built by extracting precise information from a virtual 3D model that was used to configure the design to the spatial parameters of the gallery. The various profiles for these stress-skin panels were then sent electronically to a series of local professional fabricators in the Houston light-manufacturing industry where they were water-jet cut thin-gauge aluminum, CNC hot-wire cut EPS foam, and CNC routed wood The system can be reconfigured into various architectural forms to define space, divide rooms, or suspend as a ceiling. The shape, size, and frequency of the perforations are infinitely variable to make the panels lighter and more transparent. This system is a highly flexible, dynamic, and innovative way to apply architectural fabrication technology to your domestic or commercial interior landscape.

DRINKTANK

This project created a unique and useful social space in the College. It seeks to answer a series of questions about how to provide free water, vessels for drinking, seating, lighting, and graphic signage within an integrated spatial system. The exploration that began on the ceiling datum like the LiteBEAM, but now folds down to become a wall with a double-curvature geometry. The form of the wall is determined by taking the width of the adjacent corridor at the base that transforms in section to the dimension of the existing modular ceiling grid and lighting system. The wall is self supporting while retaining a translucency to transmit natural and artificial light through fiber-optic effects demonstrated in the luminaire projects.

LITEBEAM

Lite Beam was a function of available local fabrication resources, as well as a basic desire to modify and expand the parameters of the typical “suspended ceiling system”. Primary elements – beams – were conceived as sculpted solid forms, complex shapes that are simple catenary expressions of a uniform load over a simple span. Between each beam is a series of vertical lenses, CNC router-cut from ½” thick clear plexi-glass. These are embedded with colored cold-cathode lighting, and support a series of fluorescent single tube fixtures that provided indirect lighting between each of the 4 beams. Below the lenses and in between each beam are a series of three shells – concave space frames that serve to capture and diffuse the light emitted from the fluorescent tubes and the edges of the lenses. While this iteration of the LiteBEAM System extends for 4 modules, it is understood as a repetitive system that could extend indefinitely.

LOVETT STAIR ENCLOSURE

Completed in 2005, the project was a stair enclosure for Lovett College. Fabricated with alternating panels of glass and perforated metal, the enclosure serves as a means to keep inebriated Rice University med students from crashing parties in the building, while still allowing them to observe the possible events they are now barricaded from .