Textile hybrid

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The project starts from the restoration of an iconic historical building in Milan, the Castello Sforzesco. The intervention brief called for a reduction of the light reaching Leonardo da Vinci’s frescoes, while still giving a perception of visual connection to the outside. 

Knitted fabrics have a visual permeability that provides just that, so they were chosen to cover the two vaulted windows of the room, that reach 3 meters in width and 6 in height. The fabric stretches into a doubly-curved surface that complements the vaulted ceiling, while adding extra stability at the same time. This also allowed for the fabric to be produced in one single piece, since production width was limited to 2 meters.

The final solution for the self-standing structure is a so-called textile hybrid, made of rigid bent rods and fabric in tension. This novel hybrid structure needs only 4 perforations to be installed and no perforations on the vault, which was one of the priorities of the client. The design process was informed by material tests, analysis of the structure’s stability with a computational model, a 1:10 model, a 1:1,5 mock-up and a 1:1 prototype.

The challenge proposed by Hyperbody studio was to completely rethink  a student housing facility to be placed near campus in Delft, mainly by integrating it with design-to-robotic production. 

The project proposal focuses on user-oriented adaptability and transforms the student residence in a living organism that constantly changes, based on feedback from research done by using the approach of design thinking. 

A modular approach is used to tackle the complexity, thus a unit of three rooms is replicated throughout the entire area. Every room has walls that can be moved to five different configurations just by pressing a button, depending on the level of privacy the student desires. This translates into 21 total scenarios per unit. 

Walls are composed of a skin with varied transparency and a 3D-printed skeleton. The latter has a parametrically designed auxetic pattern that is crucial to guide the deformation of the wall as it moves.

In the light of the Milano Animal City theme, this project applies town planning in a non-anthropocentric way in order to improve the city’s biodiversity and ecosystem. 

The project proposes using gaps on top of supermarkets, which are currently dead spaces in the city, to host structures that could potentially be used as nests from a variety of animals. In order to attract the animals to the gaps, a cart of food that is furnished from leftovers of the supermarket was thought to travel in a spiral through the space, thus also tackling the problem of waste. 

Two solutions were explored for different contexts, a bridge for used terraces and a basket for unused terraces, to be replicated in the whole city. The shapes were computationally designed based on aerodynamic wind simulations, in order to provide a better environment for the animals inside the structures. The intended material is recycled cardboard, in the form of tubes.