Rastering a design idea with AI

So this week assignment is to model something we would like to do as a Final Project, so what I did first was to rethink my Final Project idea from week 01: Instead of designing an object/gadget, I want to design an spacial experience.

The main concept remains untouched: We are sounding to movement... Only we are not focusing on Disco Balls this time. Instead, I'm reaching a more architectural point of view, where not only people are dancing/sounding, but also walls are.

I ask myself: "How is it that places/installations designs deal with sounds and acoustics?" As an architect, I know for sure that not every designer thinks about acoustics, but if I want to create a spacial experience, then I need to deal with the acoustics.

With this in mind, I came up to Pixlr and tried its AI Image Generator, but I didn't quite like the first results... I need to do some research before deciding what to model.

Research & References

Lucky me, I found a whole research from Barcelona about places, design and acoustics. There's a duo project called Espacios Resonantes that studies and experiment with acoustics behavior/design in architecture

A member of the duo has published his Master in Sound Art Final Project, in which he shows some acoustic architecture installations he has designed... It's inspiring, and it's exactly what I was looking for. Maybe I can design some structural shapes to make my own acoustic architectural capsule.

Diving through Espacios Resonantes work, I found some related projects, like this installation that actually looks a lot like dancing walls. The design is simple, yet quite insteresting... Now I have a better idea of what I want to model.

Vectoring and 3D-Modeling

I already use Rhinoceros, so for my design, I want to try modeling some dancing walls and its corresponding structure.

First, I had to draw some guiding lines: The orange circle to focus a center for the dancers, and some other intersected/tangent circles/curves around in order to trim them out and obtain two multiple-center curves around the dancers focus.

The whole process was exploratory in terms of design, I just was guided by me intuition and some taste... I consider a lot the composition of what I am drawing, and any curve I watched and didn't like, I erased and redrew it with different radius... But the obtained lines are only like architectural planes.

I had to extrude the previous vector to get to the 3D modeling, and during the process, I tried some other tools from Rhino like Rotate and Loft. The results seem nice, like a storytelling of the walls meeting and dancing...

The changes in the 3D design respond not only to my taste, but also to metrics and human scale, because this artistic installation is meant to be walked/toured by people, so the accesses width and height must allow it.

Turning the 3D-Model into a Structure

In order to obtain a structure, I applied some more tools from Rhino to the chosen-one 3D model, like:

• Offset surface, which you find in the "Surface Tools" cascade... I applied this to add thickness to the walls.
• Contour, which you find in the "Curve from object" cascade... I applied this tool to quickly draw parallel vertical and horizontal borderlines from the walls. These lines end up being close planar curves.
• Extrude closed planar curve, which you find in the "Solid Creation" cascade... I applied this tool to do exactly what it's called, and here you can see the results.