New View Canopy

New View is a lightweight temporary structure that maximizes spatial performance while minimizing material and structure. It was realized at the rooftop of Romantso Cultural Center in Athens Greece during May 2014 and was funded by the IKEA foundation in Switzerland. The pavilion was designed in order to energize the abandoned terrace of the building and to become summer gathering place for the people working at the creative offices hosted in the building. The motivation was to prove that such an approach could be a viable way of efficiently realize similar temporary structures at points of significant natural/cultural beauty (vista points) in the country side of Greece in order to provide shelter/shadow to the visitors, hence the name “New View”.

The project is the outcome of research in developing multi-objective generative design systems that incorporate bottom up approaches with parametric techniques for informing architectural design. In particular a workflow was developed that incorporates structural form finding with a vernacular building technique (reciprocal frames), and an agent based design system (permeability) through a continuous digital chain (digital fabrication). Based on the available resources (budget, material, people) the design system was a quickly adapted and optimized in order to realize the pavilion in 1:1 scale within the given timeframe (3 weeks).

The objective of this project was to develop and evaluate the proposed workflow, which is informed by environmental and structural analysis as well as material and construction constraints in order to increase performance objectives while enabling geometric complexity. The emphasis of the research at this stage is to elaborately study traditional techniques, material properties and assembly methods and explore how they can translate into design behaviors and simulations that enable emergent patterns to influence and improve the performance and energy footprint of the designed space.The pavilion presents results of the form finding, generative patterning, digital fabrication affordances and sets and agenda for next steps in the use of multi-agent systems and parametric design systems for design purposesThe design to production process was broken into three processes that were enabled by advanced computational design techniques:

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Credits:

• Design/Programming: Evangelos Pantazis
• Project Manager: Iason Pantazis
• Builders:Anastasios Spyridonos, Constantinos Schinas, Anastasios Dedes, Viktoras Gogas, Nikolas Panagiotopoulos, Dionysis Dikefalos, Spek, Petros Kostakis
• Monitoring Team: SoWigi – Dimitris Charitatos , Iraklis Kassimis, Thanasis Demiris
• Academic Affiliation: David Jason Gerber
• Project Sponsors: Xenakis Curved Plywood, Ikea Foundation, Lasercutter.gr, Vagio-shop,  Swop, SoWigi