Petals-ITTTS

The Petals-ITTTS (Transformable Tensegrity Timber Structure) is originally designed for Taiwan Lantern Festival. It detects the informations from environmental temperature, sunlight, and humidity, in order to control shape-changing and embedded lighting doing petal-like performance, create a mutual dialogue between residents and ecological information in public.

The design of this kinetic sculpture, seeks to combine the sensuousness of nature with the logic of algorithmic geometry and kinetic mechanism. It take a big challenge in both architecture and kinetic art field, using recursive data structure and processes (Hofstadter, 1979) to generate a kind of modular and lightweight tensegrity structure. It show a novel approach to thinking how to design of tensegrity structure with shape-changing abilities.

In the specific tensegrity structure, which design utilize the math’s self-similarity from recursion/iteration mechanism for mimic natural growth processes to create growth-like interconnected kinetic structure. We developed customized computational design tools, allowing designers to explore diverse bionic forms by adjusting the parameters of initial branch length, generative value and transform value on joints. The resulting bionic form consists of seven interconnected segments, the transformable joint between each segment functional as a self-actuated mechanical part can fit in all joints between segments in this system. Each bionic form can be seen as one petal, from the many petal-like structures that make up the circular pavilion as a flower. When the transformable joints act as stretch out, the whole structure performs as flower blooms, conversely, it becomes a flower bud when transformable joints act as shrink inward.

Constrcting a large scale kinetic sculpture is usually a difficult task, according to the whole structure must be strong enough but the transformable part need to be flexible and soft but this work demonstrates a very experimental prototype for showing this possibilities on topic of soft architecture. And other, the lighting element perfect embedded in this compression-bearing struts (timber and light) and tension-bearing cables (steel cable and electric wire) separate system (tensegrity), to make this lightweight structure with beautiful embedded lighting.

Reference

Hofstadter, D. R. (1979). Gödel, Escher, Bach: an eternal golden braid. NY: Basic Books