robusta °2 « WHO IS VIRTUOSIC?

robusta °2

07Jul08

/final studio project by Diego Camargo, Verena Vogler

HOW TO DESIGN A TREE?

Supervisor:
Vincente Guallart, Willy Müller,
Marta M. Alemany

This Studio project is about the question „how to design a tree“ as an architectonical object.
One of the most popular palmtrees in Barcelona „Washingtonia Robusta“ was our reference tree. We found many interesting features of the tree while we studied its structure relating to its function in different scales as well as its behavior in terms of its growth and its multicomplexity. We tried to find out certain rules of growth which we translated into a set of architectonical rules for the final object. We learned that the palmtree is completly composed of fibers which are arranged in a certain way.

We developed a machine giving the rules and a wire „fibers“ which have to follow these. In the end a very interesting complex object composed of different parts was developed. Each part seemed very different from one another but it followed only a few rules. The final object was more an installation than an architectural building which was planned to be placed in the park of Ciutadella in Barcelona.

When we worked on the project we had several interesting discusions with the biologist and tree expert Gerard Passola and with the expert in the field of evolutionary biology Johannes Engelken. Throughout this we have realized that some things that we have discovered as simple rules of growth are way more complex and uncertain if you analize them in detail.