Project Description:

Northern Lights Pavilion is an interactive web-based application to envision a piece of contemporary urban infrastructure made of ice blocks that would activate the areas around northern cities in Sweden. The starting point of this experimental pavilion is based on the quarter-circular Truchet pattern generating in-between maze-like curvature spaces, controlled by width, length, and pattern. The aim is to envision ephemeral spaces made of ice and snow blocks, especially in the season between December-April when many artistic projects are held there.  The objective behind creating such an app for the municipalities of the northern area of Sweden is to introduce it to the communities of these cities as a participatory design tool to democratize the decision of creating those public spaces.

The Ice Hotel in Jukkasjärvi, in northern Sweden, was a good example as a precedent for the project.

The Northern Lights were an inspiration for the form I wanted to achieve.

To create an abstract form for these curvatures, the Truchet pattern

Creating the Parametric Design in grasshopper. 1st phase was to test to bring the design to the web through Hops component. In the definition, there were no plugins used only native components, with inputs to decide both the size and the pattern of the pavilion. The resulting geometry is created using mesh gradient colors.

        

The configurator is created using Rhino and Grasshopper3d with native components, with inputs to decide both the size and the pattern of the pavilion. The resulting geometry is created using mesh gradient colors.

The site is published using a Github page in this link:

https://jumanahamdani.github.io/pavilion/

Create the Dataset in HTML file

Create the Dataset in the js file

How does it work?

Instructions:

  • First, you need to run Rhino. compute,
  • Go to the App page at this link:

    https://jumanahamdani.github.io/pavilion/

  • Change the Inputs: Width, and lengths of the pavilion, then you can input the pattern of the pavilion in the seed value based on your aesthetic preferences.
  • The OutPuts would be the Geometry of the ice pavilion, where you can download it.

Challenges:

The app was successfully deployed to Heroku, but the issue it took a very long time to load the geometry, so I decided to go with Github pages and run it locally.

 

If there would be further improvement to be done, I would like to optimize my geometry to use a light file in order to load fast.

I would as well to create a toolset in the app for other disciplines that can participate in the design decision of the pavilion.

Link to the Repo :

https://github.com/JumanaHamdani/pavilion

 

Northern Light Pavilion is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at the Masters in Advanced Computation for Architecture and Design in 2022 by Jumana Hamdani and Faculty: David Andrés León, Hesham Shawqy.