Project Sydney Opera House I : Morphology – Biomimicry

Designed by huan miao khoo, this project experiments the fundamental concrete shell structures of sydney opera house, extracting the structural forces and reinterpreting those elements through biomimicry methodology. 

 

The project aims to reinterpret the lightness of the shell structure, by extracting the structural force paths.  the retro digitization of the Sydney Opera House invokes the simplicity of the geometry’s surface against the complexity of the forces distributions.  The state-of-the-art building is organically portrayed through dynamism generated through a process defined by rules and parameters elicited from the building’s original design concepts.  Interrogation into the geometry of the concrete shells and application of biomimicry methodology provides opportunity of reinterpretation with different materials, therefore of similar forms but different expressions with an interesting outcome.

 Night time lighting

 Daytime shadow 

 Interior - opera halls with undulating structural surfaces

COMPOSITE ENVIRONMENT: MODULAR VARIABILITY & ECOLOGICAL SPECIFICITY

 
This project investigates the use of parametric design for form-finding and fabrication techniques that are specific to an environment and location.  From various parametric methodologies including stacking, aggregation, bundling technique is chosen.  Bundling implies: a series of uniform elements such as string or sticks that are deformed to create intersecting nodes.  As a result, the geometry and typology changes in different intensities of convergence and divergence.  The entire process is governed by a predetermined set of parameters and with the application of algoritms and functions, interesting forms and spaces are generated.


For this housing project, the parameters that govern the forms are determined by external environmental factors, including solar orientation, wind, topography and privacy.  The controlled parameters include site access, number of bedrooms and amount of apertures.

Linear typology

Scatter typology

Interior

House: 1 Bedroom v1

House: 2 Bedrooms v1

House: 3 Bedrooms v1

Exploded Axonometric

The footprint of a prefab construction impacts far less on the building site compared to a traditional building foundation.  As this method also employs off-site fabrication and assembly, there is a significantly reduced impact on the site with regard to disturbance, run-off and waste. It is much easier to control waste streams in a factory, as waste can easily be separated for recycling at the point of creation on an assembly line than on a building site, where experience tells us, material separation is often difficult to achieve. From required building material, up to thirty to forty percent of building material waste generated from conventional building ends up in landfill, compared to as little as two percent waste achieved through prefabrication methods.

Materiality

Construction Staging

Relationship between variation of housing modules determined by parameters such as 

overshadowing, privacy and ventilation.

Courtyard communal parameters