Learning From Candela represents our first attempt to bridge the gap between contemporary design techniques, creative expression, and software technology.

The project successfully built a shell prototype in Mexico City, using local building traditions (including local means, labour and craft).  The prototype was brought about by using established form-finding methods—both analog and digital counterparts.

The resultant geometries afford a qualitative understanding of form and its structural behaviour to the designer and downstream production pipes. Furthermore, it is increasingly difficult to establish the same with the complex freeform geometries produced by contemporary software and methods. However, these methods offer other significant advantages to the designer, including ease of use, affinity to contemporary discourse, etc. In this project a waffle-customized formwork was introduced as an effective link between computational design methods and their physical manifestation, and as a response to the constraints of the materials used—steel and rendered concrete—and the constraints of the labor-intensive economy where the shell prototype was built.

Team:

Alicia Nahmad (R-Ex)
Shajay Bhooshan (ZHCODE)
Mustafa el Sayed (ZHCODE)
Joshua Zabel (Kreysler & Associates)
Knut Brunier (Brunier Ernst AG)