“It floats!” is a spatial design project that delves into the complex relationship between gravity, energy, and the intricate layers of human experience.
Role
Designer, Fabricator
Focus
Spatial Design, User Experience, History and Theory
Presentation shot at Harvard GSD
“It floats!”
‘It floats!’ transports the viewer back to the early 20th century, a time when scientific and technological advancements created a disorienting atmosphere with the advent of radiowaves and wireless transmission. This project envisions a learning center for media, designed as an entropic yet interconnected structure. Wooden tubes represent a continuous media space, serving as a metaphor for our immersion in the digital realm. The sequence of movements is manifested in tube-shaped forms, enabling floating escalators, oblique surfaces, and image projections to heighten our awareness of the body and reveal a new relationship between humans and technology. As the spaces and devices through which we consume information increasingly merge with our physical selves, architecture becomes a medium for embodied experience.
“Black Virtue”, Matta (Roberto Matta Echaurren), 1943
By blending the physicality of gravity with the fluidity of energy, the project creates immersive spaces that evoke a sense of weightlessness, tension, and transformation. The result is a reimagined architectural experience that invites individuals to engage with their surroundings in new and thought-provoking ways, allowing for a deeper connection between body, mind, and space.
Tensile structure models made with wood and fish strings
Suspended Construction, Katarzyna Kobro, 1921
“Circa 1921”
Referencing the theoretical foundations of the Constructivists artists including Kazmir Malevich, El Lizziski, and Katarzyna Kobro, the project looks into the parallel socio-political landscapes of the 20th century and the 21th century, critiques the change in thought and behavior of the current day, both virtually and physically.
A series of hard/soft body collision simulations are conducted in Blender and Maya to manipulate physical dynamics within a virtual space, the project aims to simulate how sudden changes in volume, motion, and structure can create a sensory experience that challenges our usual understanding of space.
Animation and Rendering made in Blender
The project was realized using a variety of software, including Maya, Blender, Rhino, and Enscape. A combination of tools was employed to simulate soft and hard body collisions, resulting in an animation series that mimics real-life gravity while allowing for the manipulation of key metrics. Tension and compression elements overlap, live and dead loads interact within a suspended structure, creating disorienting, enclosed, and indeterminate spaces.
“The sun as the expression of old world energy is torn down from the heavens by modern man, who by virtue of his technological superiority creates his own energy source.”
— El Lissitzky
A nostalgic return to 90s deconstructivist architecture, where spatial thinking is deeply rooted in the avant-garde Zeitgeist of the time. The semiotics of architectural language and the tectonic symphonies that open creative forces, serving as an optimism for the techno-future, lay the foundation for this project.
“The mason was struck by the fact that expended energy does not get lost; it remains stored for many years, never diminished, latent in the block of stone, until one day it happens that the block slides off the roof and falls on the head of a passerby, killing him.”
— Max Planck via Aldo Rossi
Animation and Rendering made in Blender, Maya, Arnold
Glass Video Gallery, Tschumi, 1990
