Second Skin - as Air Purifier
This year’s Studio project had the theme Second Skin, and each student had to figure it out for himself what a second skin might be. The concept should be placed in the campus of Fontys Academy in Tilburg, in the most appropriate part of it.
While exploring different types of “second skin’’ meanings, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is at least a barrier between the body and the outside world. In this case a pair of sunglasses might be a second skin for your eyes and an air purifier might be a second skin for your lungs.
I’ve chosen to make an installation that can fit plants, a natural air purifier, placed in what I’ve discovered to be the area with the most polluted air in the campus. Plants are very altruistic, they don’t purify air just for one person, this is also the social aspect of my concept.
The area in fact is a basement exit on top of which there is a “wind tunnel”effect between the two campus exits to the streets. This effect keeps the air entrap in those small openings.
During the studio I have been experimenting with different materials and I have ended up using mostly terracotta, to maintain the natural aspect of the design.
I have used Grasshopper to generate the checkerboard pattern for the modules, based on a previously generated set of curves. I have created an algorithm to standardise all the modules to 6 sizes. I have also used that algorithm to extract the position of each modulem the type of the size, the neighbours of that module and the intersection distance with each neighbour module. All of this information has been extracted and used in a stress simulation for the structural resistance.
Two sections from the pavilion have been selected and tested together, under the same circumstance, in a Static Stress Analysis using the software Fusion 360. The result, after multiple improvements, is 0,1mm maximum deformation, a result that confirms a sturdy structure.
