Refining the research question

Last Monday we had a presentation with the group together with almost all the research tutors. In total there where about 8 I believe, so the pressure was on there. But fortunately it was a relaxt atmosphere, there was some debate and every body got comments on there issue.

In my presentation I tried to state the things that where important for me. Construction, architecture, integration, materials, free form design are some of the terms stated. This free form design thing developed rapidly and based on the last comment from Andre I got just the extra inspiration needed. The design question stated in the presentation was:

"How can/should a parametric-associative model be constructed which assists designers in exploring integrated ways of structuring free-form buildings - i.e. building them out of relatively homogeneous materials?"

Still a bit complex maybe but it was of course still a proposal. The idea is that the construction of such a free form design, should be totally encapsulated in the façade, so it results in a free floor plan without any construction walls or columns. A nice discussion with the research tutors started after my presentation and I got some usable comments from that. A brief result of the discussion was that the research domain was still way to broad and I had to narrow down my research. Some keywords of this discussion where: material choice, scale, shape, construction method and related to that the cost.

I already had some idea to base the design on a single type / homogeneous material, but wasn't quite sure which would be interesting to use. Because steel and wood use relatively common construction methods (Columns and beams) my focus turned to concrete. In theory the façade could be slimmer when using a material that covers the entire façade in comparison with materials that uses a column/beam structure, so my main focus is on concrete. Still I'm doing a bit of research to maybe use some new technical materials like polymers, but till now the material strength and durability of these materials is a bit questionable.

To be continued...