Month: December 2012

Assembly One Pavilion / Yale School of Architecture Students

© Chris Morgan Photography’
The Yale ‘Assembly One’ pavilion is the younger, smaller, more carefree sister to Yale’s building project – a 40-year old tradition in which first-year students design and building a house. It is the product of a seminar and design studio in which students focused on alternative ways in which contemporary buildings can come together and the potential architectural effects computational and material techniques can offer. The ‘Assembly One’ pavilion is designed to act as an information center for New Haven’s summer International Festival of Arts and Ideas and therefore was developed with the following characteristics in mind: dynamism, visual transparency and visual density.
   
© Chris Morgan Photography


Dynamism: The structure is suited to a performance festival – solid and massive from one angle, lightweight and almost entirely porous from another, it alternately hides and reveals its contents.
Visual Transparency: Constructed from thin  sheets, the pavilion opens up on two sides for ventilation and security, focusing views toward the festival’s main stage.
Visual Density: Over 1000 panels create shifting effects of reflection and color as visitors move around the pavilion, creating less of a timeless image of shelter than an unstable, engaging heart of the festival.











“We treated the tenets of digital fabrication as basic assumptions – our ability to efficiently produce variable and unique components and the cultural implications of moving beyond standardized manufacturing. But, we were less concerned with the uniqueness of the objects we created than on the novel types of tectonic expression they allowed.”The Festival Pavilion was designed and built by  students.

Project Founders: David Bench, Zac Heaps, Jacqueline Ho, Eric Zahn
Project Managers: Jacqueline Ho, Amy Mielke
Design & Fabrication: John Taylor Bachman, Nicholas Hunt, Seema Kairam, John Lacy, Veer Nanavatty
Design: Rob Bundy, Raven Hardison, Matt Hettler
Faculty advisor: Brennan Buck
Assistant: Teoman Ayas
Consultant: Matthew Clark of Arup, New York

Generous support was provided by Assa Abloy, the Yale Graduate and Professional Student Senate, and the Yale School of Architecture. The Pavilion is on view on the New Haven Green until the end of June.
© Chris Morgan Photography

Mach 3 bubble shock waves

The best way to recover from a week of overeating, movie watching and napping? Is to sit back and watch some cool physics videos.

We have another featured video from last week’s Division of Fluid Dynamics Meeting in San Diego, CA.

The video below shows what happens when a Mach 3 shockwave slams into a helium bubble. Researchers needed a supercomputer cluster to simulate the phenomenon, revealing how density and vorticity (more on that after the jump) evolve during the process.

Video Credit: Babak Hejazialhosseini, Diego Rossinelli and Petros Koumoutsakos from the Computational Science and Engineering Laboratory, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Simulations in the video focus on two key physical qualities: density and vorticity. Density, as you’re probably aware, is simply the amount of mass per unit of volume. In the video, the high density regions are orange whereas the low density areas are blue.

Vorticity, however, is not quite as simple. Vorticity represents how a fluid is rotating at a specific point, and it has similarities to angular momentum. Vorticity has both a magnitude (or length) and a direction.

In the video, the researchers show the strength (magnitude) of vorticity at the various points, but not its direction. If they showed the direction at each point, there’d be a ton of tiny arrows pointing in a variety of directions.

With the aid of these simulations, researchers can learn the complex dynamics behind the shockwave’s propagation. But what’s the point of looking at these shockwaves, aside from making awesome videos?

One technique cited in the video, shockwave lithotripsy, could benefit from this research. For this medical procedure, doctors direct shockwaves to shatter kidney or bladder stones into many smaller pieces. Now that’s my kind of treatment.

Posted by Hyperspace