Ant hill

Ant hill is a place that tries to enrich the site at Koceľova street, areal of our university. It stands above gates, made of plastic beer crates, but inside, what is not visible, are various things happening.
There are spaces that are large enough to make a camp fire or dance, or so small that you will barely fit into them. In some you will have to crawl, in some anybody don’t want you to go and it’s too narrow.

Basic shape of the building is generated, but as long it is made out of beer crates, you can add how much you want, and take some aswell. There are new spaces for studios, exhibitions, leisure, altrough it is mostly a summer instalation, because of missing insulation, it can be equiped with water insulation from above. Minecraft is quite suitable tool for editing this design, here used also for showing, how playful creating a space can be, with actual rational stress analysis result.

Project has a further development.

Section

Sun evaluating

Structure above Koceľova university areal suposed to be visible and attractive for people walking through the street. It should be as large as possible, but at the same time do not cast deep shadows onto studios. The shape is generated by calculating casted shadow area onto the windows and minimising this number. Galapagos component in Grasshopper plugin generates loft by moving and shaping splines

Building

Among many possible ways how to build static structure with inner spaces, the rational solution is to build it out of blocks. The best are empty (or some full) beer crates.

Displacement

Analysing the structure using Millipede plugin leads to one (or more) points with biggest displacement. This point will be used at later stage of design.

Stress

Analysing the Von Mises stress forces. Surface map of tensions, helps to create a rope support.

Rope

Provides tension. They are attached to surface layer of crates, do not disturb inside spaces (yellow are a bunch of random isocurves, in gray are the longest, selected).

Spaces

Inside space begins as a voronoi seed, determined by density. This density is depending on displacement point, in this case in the middle of a “bridge”.

Inside

Spaces are offseted in at least two crates distance, so the structure holds together. Smaller parts as specific volume are automaticaly deleted.

Connections

There are a series of halls, narrow tunels, ladders or huge holes. Connections are calculated to be shortest and efective path to next cell.

Windows

Crates offer four sides of a cube solid, one open and one with transparent grid. If they are rotated bottom up, they provide enough light. But some spaces requires more light or view. Holes can be closed then.

Minecraft

Main part of cyclic analysis is using a 3d first person PC game, where you build structures out of blocks of any material. This result was posted on a Minecraft forum, with request to edit inside of it, as they wish and send me back their result. It should be analysed, along with other results, and pick one, according to low displacement values. It is a hybrid human operated and populated computer analysis.

Plan sections

Next development of Ant hill project