I will be posting to this weblog throughout the year-long design period to document my design process, ideas and more. Check back often to see how I'm doing, and add comments to the entries if you'd like.

Week 7

March 13th, 2010 by Alex Fortney | Posted in General Posts, Milwaukee Innovation Center, Precedents, Program, Thesis | Comments Off

Week 7 has consisted of some research and a lot of design work, but I have tabled crits until next week so there is little output to show. I decided that next week, before spring break, I will present my pre-interim presentation with my whole committee. Up until this point, due to schedules, I have been unable to get my whole committee together to discuss my project, but next Thursday that will change. I won’t be taking a spring break, but instead use that time to get ahead on their design changes and avoid and surprises as the actual interm presentation which is in a month.

During the course of my research I came across an article in Wired magazine from January which seems like it was written for me! The title of the issue was “Atoms and the New Bits” detailing how do-it-yourself has moved from software to hardware, i.e. people now have the capacity to make their own products and sell them worldwide without a huge investment in equipment – which is exactly one of the ideas for the Milwaukee Innovation Center.

From the article:

Tech Shop

Tech Shop

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

Local Motors

Local Motors

Local Motors plans to release between 500 and 2,000 units of each model. It’s a niche vehicle; it won’t compete with the major automakers but rather fill in the gaps in the marketplace for unique designs. Rogers uses the analogy of a jar of marbles, each of which represents a vehicle from a major automaker. In between the marbles is empty space, space that can be filled with grains of sand — and those grains are Local Motors cars.

Read the whole article here: http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1

Below is a preliminary rendering of the interior office space, and a couple photos I was playing with:

Preliminary Interior

Preliminary Interior

Interior

Interior

Exterior

Exterior


Week 6

March 6th, 2010 by Alex Fortney | Posted in Milwaukee Innovation Center, Thesis | Comments Off

Well week 6 has come and gone and with it a significant change to my project. Most notably, I have moved the location of the building itself. I have moved it east across the commuter rail tracks to the area formerly occupied by the coal pile. I am converting the area to a wetland and having the building integrated with, and overlooking, the wetland has been an important part. Unfortunately, it was proving unrealistic to try to connect the building and wetland across the elevated commuter rail, which proved to be a significant barrier.

Below are a few images of the first scheme, presented on Monday, which shows the original location of the building. The tunnel and visual connections were only barely effective. Additionally, I was unable to reconcile both the 90° angle between the Amtrak rail line and Greenfield Avenue, and the roughly 60° angle between Greenfield and the Commuter track, only a few hundred feet east.

Ultimately there will still be a building on the original site, but it will be a rectilinear building bordered by a new road, Innovation Drive, cutting south across the former Solvay Coke and Gas buildings. The two buildings can be preserved as an urban ruin, or be turned into some other use which I will define later in my schematic site development.

The building on its new site takes two shapes: one is a north/south bar which creates a courtyard between the Commuter line and Milwaukee Innovation Center, the other employs the same bridge-like structure above the landscape. Presently I am leaning towards Scheme B because it is much more dynamic and creates a better space beneath the building.

Below are some renderings prepared for crit on Monday:

Next week: pick a scheme and develop it further. I am now working toward my goal of a fairly developed scheme before Spring Break.


Week 5

February 27th, 2010 by Alex Fortney | Posted in Milwaukee Innovation Center, Scripting, Thesis | Comments Off

I started this week by creating a large section through my site showing conceptually how the elevated rail, the Milwaukee Innovation Center and the wetland are positioned. Below is the overall section and details:

Preliminary Wetland Section Overall

Preliminary Wetland Section Overall

Preliminary Wetland Section Detail East

Preliminary Wetland Section Detail East

Preliminary Wetland Section Detail West

Preliminary Wetland Section Detail West

I was pretty satisfied how it turned out. I placed the plants according to how much water they prefer: lily pads with deep water; cattails, wild rice and switch grass medium; ash trees and taller grasses moist soil; and ash trees liking fairly dry soil.

The wood platforms seen throughout the section are comprised of two pylons and a cross member. I started working on a script last week that generated the angles and elevations within a series of parameters, but the more I learn with Kyle’s Digital Design class I continue to improve the script. The next generation pictured below takes points supplied by the user (by clicking) to generate the walkway. It still needs some improvements, but it is getting closer:

Articulated Walkway Overhead

Articulated Walkway Overhead

Articulated Walkway Axon

Articulated Walkway Axon

It has become increasingly obvious that what I really required was a polar script. MicroStation allows users to enter rectilinear values (X,Y,Z) or polar values (Angle, Distance) but scripting thus far only has dealt with XYZ. I first developed a polar function, which takes a start point, an angle and a distance and uses trigonometry to determine the position of the end point and returns that XYZ value. The beauty is that I can define an angle range from -10° to 10° and have it draw a zig-zag line with variation, but overall is fairly straight.

I used the principle to create a series of mound shapes for my wetland terrain. I was inspired by Stoss LU (see last week). The script draws 6 points and 6 lines, with points 1-3 between -20° and 20° and points 4-6 draw in reverse, from 160° to 200° (the first set + 180°). The last line connects point 6 to the start at point 1. The result are 6-sided trapezoid shapes. A check function had to be added to determine if any of the lines were crossing and if they did it would reject the points and start over. Twisted shapes would not work. Finally, two points are extended from the middle of the shape to form the top points of the mound. All of these points and then connected with triangular planes to form a 3D object.

Below are a few examples of the shapes generated:

Mounds v1 Sample

Mounds v1 Sample

I then chained them along a zig-zag line as described above using the start point of the next as the mid point of the previous to make a snake:

Mounds v1 Chain

Mounds v1 Chain

The lines sometimes intersect and/or cross which makes nice areas between the landforms for water to collect. Below is a gallery with additional images from the first script:

I then re-wrote the script and the polar function to accommodate spherical geometry, meaning that I can sent a polar vector into any place in space, not just along a plane. The polar function was more complex, but made the actual mound-generating script much easier: I never had to check to see if lines crossed because they were all radiating from a central point. Each point got a 60° piece of the 360° pie and was able to randomly place a point within that area. The left and right pieces were supplied with a longer vector, making the overall shape longer length-wise that height-wise. The height points were also based a the same center point, yielding a very similar mound shape, but is much more efficient and easier to modify:

Mounds v2 Sample

Mounds v2 Sample

I used the polar function again to generate a path framework for the mounds to follow, but instead made them radiate from a single point instead of being parallel. The mound determines the angle of the line used to make the framework, and orients itself along that axis so the long ends are always parallel to the path. Here are some images of the second version script and the radiating and branching effect:

Combined with the existing terrain and the branching script (with some tweaking) generated a system which I am really happy with. Below are two perspectives:

Mounds v2 Axon

Mounds v2 Axon

Mounds v2 Perspective

Mounds v2 Perspective

Next week: back to building design.


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