Vision

The world is increasingly urbanizing today, half of humanity 3.5 billion people lives in cities and by 2050, two-thirds of the population will call a city home. As a result of this urbanization, our cities are growing by the minute. Every minute, we add 10,000 square meters of city space, this results in a decrease in public and green spaces, we are looking through our project to tackle this issue by occupying the empty space, above streets, vacant lots and low-rise buildings, in order to extend the public realm of small residential areas.

Site 

We will apply our project “The Cloud’s Garden” In Hong Kong above state theater (abandoned theater) and afterwards generalize the idea in a way to replicate it anywhere in the world.

Concept

The approach consists in using the vertical circulation core and the space between windows of existing skyscrapers as anchors that will support our floating structure, garden. We start by determining the mid area between the skyscrapers to host the cloud’s garden, the points on the facades to serve as structural arms and the points on the vertical circulation to define the access arms that will allow people to access the middle garden. The next step consists in using fatten component to create a mesh and then relax it using kangaroo.

Optimization

We will later on optimize the structure using Wallacei with the following fitness factors: minimum height difference between arms, minimum displacement, maximum core volume and maximum sunlight to the façade windows. This optimization will be done using 1000 population which will allow us later on to choose the best solution.

Fitness factors:

Selection:

Skin

After choosing our optimized mesh we will apply the skin which will open up towards the middle of our structure to allow light into the garden.

The Cloud’s Garden is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master in Advanced Computation for Architecture & Design in 2021/22 by:
Students: Charbel Baliss, João Silva, Alexander Tong Faculty: Rodrigo Aguirre & Hesham Shawqy