ADDITIVE APPLICATIONS
SITE // Hardin Valley- Knoxville, Tennessee
PROGRAM // courtyard surfaces + programming
SEMESTER // spring 2020
RESEARCH ADVISOR // Andrew Madl
ABSTRACT
Local Motors is an emergent mobility company founded in 2007 in Phoenix, Arizona with a focus on the application of vehicular, three-dimensional additive manufacturing. The University of Tennessee College of Architecture + Design spring 2020 fourth year integrations design studio reinterprets the existing site of Local Motors’s Knoxville micro factory for an additional structure to serve as a research + design center. The company, while still growing, has seen impressive growth with the opening of a Local Motors microfactory in Hardin Valley, Knoxville, along the Tennessee Technological Development Corridor.
This project posits the use and simulation of agent-based modelling using Java coding and Grasshopper for Rhino for speculating possible re-compositions of the various courtyards within a proposed Local Motors research and design center (see Valley Forward). Through using the highly versatile, iterative nature of algorithmic modelling, it is possible to simulate agent-based behaviors including but not limited to random wandering, exponential spawning, repulsive and attractive forces, and flocking and separation in a variety of applications and scales. The research hopes to utilize existing research into agent-based simulation and computational design by furthering the agenda of rethinking the traditional courtyard as a series of programmatic components that are dependent on human interaction.
METHODOLOGIES
The research will be conducted using a series of controlled, agent-based simulations using Grasshopper algorithms generated within the culebra, nudibranch, and quelea plugins. Experimentation will be conducted on two main scales, systemic and form-based, assuming the agent as a human user within the courtyard experience. Systemic experiments will focus on the overall simulation of the deconstructed courtyard as a whole, whereas form-based experiments will focus on the specific design of a single programmatic block.
The overall pseudocode of the experiments is focused on establishing the two-dimensional surface, creating the walker script, feeding the resultants into a series of extrusions based on the proximity of walkers, and finally visualizing the entire simulation as a collection of active and inactive spaces. Adjustment of the parameters of the simulation includes the number of walker spawn, the agent behavior, the tolerance of the extrusion attractors, and the surface on which the simulation is taking place. The intent of resultant block extrusions from the experiments is used further within the Local Motors integrations project as a means to represent the various configurations that could be born from computationally rethinking the way that the courtyard is approached.
