Fluid Motion Process

Fluid Motion Process

Alexander Skipitaris and 2 OthersYoni Segal
Nuradin Bhatti

Our project began with a brainstorm. The entire studio was thinking of things that didn’t happen in a normal city, which we could make into public structures that doubled as bike shelters. Our idea was the fluid motion of waves. We were introduced to a book called Sensitive Chaos, about the motion of waves and air currents, to help with our project. After looking at the images in the book, our first plan was formed. The plan was to do something we called ‘voxelization’ to an image from Sensitive Chaos. What we meant by ‘voxelizing’ was raising up the image in pillars of 3d pixels, called voxels, based on how bright they were. We did this through the medium of Minecraft. We wanted to create a physical model with the voxelized model, but the voxelized model was too detailed for the printer. Not letting this stop us, we shrank the image to half size and tried again. This seemed like it would work out well, so we exported it to the printer. This produced a model which looked cool, but lacked depth. We realized then that depth was the problem with the idea as a whole; white that was high up in the original picture looked the same as white that was lower, and there was no flow. We then scrapped the idea of voxelization, merely using it as inspiration. Our next idea was to use pieces of wood to outline the flow in the image. This worked well, but did not have the crashing and flowing feel we wanted. Our last idea was to trace the park we had chosen as our site, and raise and lower the sketch to get a landscape. We tried this on the Sensitive Chaos image as well, but it did not produce as good results as the site plan.