In this post I tried to reproduce a curtain wall facade inspired by the one realised by Herzog and De Meuron in their M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.

As I know, the workflow they used to get this amazing result was longer and more refined than mine. The reason why I let myself be inspired by this project is because I found interesting the relationship between the diameter variation of the holes and the shade they provide inside.

So, I can start immediately to show my workflow.

PERFORATED PANEL

At first I shaped the panel.

I Created a new family> Metric Curtain Wall Panel (in this environment I shaped the component I wanted to be the basic module of the curtain wall facade)

I Saved the file as a family

I Created an Extrusion. In the Exterior view I drew a rectangle> I aligned each side of it to the pre-formed reference planes.

I gave the panel the dimension wanted.

Then I started to draw reference planes in order to have guides when I needed to draw the holes after.

I kept in mind that in order to have a better result when I would have mounted all the panels together I needed to halve the space between the last column and the edge of the panel. So if I the space between two consecutive columns was 40 cm, the space between the last column and the end of the panel was 20 cm.

Then I drew the holes.

As my goal was to be able to control their diameter variation I assigned them a parameter.

I assigned just instance parameters because I wanted to control each panel separately when I would came after in the project environment.

I assigned parameters to the holes’ diameter. 

I made some corrections when I closed the extrusion just to adjust final result.

I created reference plane in the plan view to align my extrusion with. This was the final result.

CURTAIN WALL

So, I created a new project file. New> Project> Template file> none> I chose metric as system of measurement.

I created an architectural wall. Then I edited the curtain wall. Edit type (in properties tab)> System Family: curtain wall> I duplicated and renamed the type.

I added an elevation view. View> elevation> Project browser> elevation

I gave the wall the dimensions needed and then I set as I want them to be.

I drew the grid. Architecture> Curtain Grid.

I loaded into the project the panel previously shaped and it was immediately visible in the families, in the project browser tab.

In the Curtain Wall Type Properties tab I set my panel as the panel for the curtain wall.

At last I tried with some variation clicking on a single panel and varying the holes’ diameter values.

This year, just a week ago, I had the opportunity to present the RhOME for denCity project at the Autodesk Idol, an event within the Autodesk University in Las Vegas.
RhOME, by Roma Tre University, participated to the Solar Decathlon Europe 2014 in France, and actually won the international contest, for the happiness of all of us who worked several months, and several nights, at the project, and for the pride of the entire University, and Country.

What is Solar Decathlon. It’s an international competition about sustainable architecture that deeply analyses and evaluates a project as to ten different categories: Architecture, Engineering and Construction, Energy Efficiency, Communication and Social Awareness, Urban Design, Transportation and Affordability, Sustainability, Innovation plus Comfort Conditions, House Functioning, Electrical Energy Balance.

20 teams are selected all over the world to participate, and this year the organization asked all the teams to define a dwelling solution for their own Country or city of origin.

So we had to design a project for the city of Rome, a home for Rome, that means we had to face the complexity and the contradictions of the city and of Italy.

We decided to settle our project in the city slums, such as this one in the picture, where poverty and degradation meet history and beauty.

And we obviously had to design for the Mediterranean climate, which is complex, because we have to protect our buildings from cold as well as from hot weather, so that the sun is both friend and enemy.

Moreover, they asked us to design a complete, affordable, integrated urban solution, but also to extract a prototype, scale 1:1, of a single apartment, to be built in just 10 days.

So, for those who think that a sketch, an idea, an intuition, is almost where the architect’s work starts and ends, maybe it’s time to change the slant.

If we want to design the future, we have to design a process, open to innovation and able to face complexity.
That’s why we decided to move from a traditional linear model to a radial one, where the design is collaborative, and where the decathletes, the architects, are in-between figures, just between the project, obviously managed in a BIM shared platform, and the specialist point of view, that is often the greatest enemy of innovation.

That’s how we managed to define a complete model of the house, a constructive model, with all the real components of the project, that gave us the possibility to foresee and solve in advance the possible issues concerning production, and to detect on time the clashes between the systems to be installed

Managing the assembly phase on site and getting, at last, a totally functioning house in so short a time.

That’s how we also managed to research, design and prototype new, innovative and integrated solar production systems, such as the thermodynamic baluster and the photovoltaic shading screen.

That’s how we can define a sustainable solution, a solution that takes into consideration the complete lifecycle of every material within the process, creating virtuous cycles of regeneration, from waste into new resources.

That’s how we, as architects, can manage to ask our house to communicate the monitored data directly to the inhabitant, involving him in a process of ecological learning.

That’s how we can think of a smartcity within the city of Rome.

That’s how we reach beauty

and how we can try to offer our own Country the vision we have of the future.