DISTRIBUTION FACILITY
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA BERKELEY
Honors Studio, Fall 2007
PROGRAM: 100,000 SF Materials Distribution Facility in San Francisco, CA
STRATEGY:
The Materials Distribution Facility is a re-imagination of the big box home-improvement retailer. Using a unique programmatic strategy based on the Voronoi Algorithm, traditional organizational principles are rejected in favor of system which favors a multiplicity of adjacencies between products. This new paradigm creates unlikely adjacency conditions between seemingly disparate products which in turn results in a user experience which is more amenable to creative appropriation of an existing system.
Consideration of the Voronoi as a system for which real world architectural solutions can be created, requires a clear premeditation of program nodes, an examination of the resulting adjacencies, and a treatment for each membrane condition between the nodes in space and external spaces.
The voronoi then is a tool for analyzing the relationships in program well beyond traditional diagrams that still maintains a logic of nested self-similarities throughout an internally comprehensible but still externally inscrutible artifact.
The formal project of the Materials Distribution Facility recognizes a central preoccupation of contemporary architectural discourse with computation in design and the use of natural genetic algorithms in the genesis of space and form, the voronoi being one of these (although admittedly comtemporary at the time of design, it has since fallen into disfavor as a momentary style). What has been exciting about the voronoi in an architectural context is the potential for structural superiority since it is so frequently used in nature as an efficient structure, from radiolaria to foam. And of course, the formal solution produces a visually and spatially engaging artifact that is not constrained by traditional forms as precedent.
This post is tagged: 3dvoronoi, architecture, berkeley, voronoi