“CLOUDY CRYSTAL SKY:
Designing an Incubator for Advanced Materials Businesses/Start-Ups”

The Studio will explore and develop spaces best suited to house, nurture and inspire research, development and advertisement of Advanced Materials Businesses whose main objectives are to create new relationships and exchanges between water and architectural and transportation bodies.

The purpose of this Incubator is to create a direct mutual relationship between the work developed within it and the surrounding site of its deployment. This can be explored in different ways, defined and enriched along the semester by each student, however, students are encouraged to:
- engage the proximity of the river and of a urban-dense area
- take into account the location of the Incubator in relationship to expected flooding lines
- consider the incubator unique location potential for advertisement purposes of the products made within

The general program given to all sections will be given further detail by each student through research on precedent cases for this particular type of business incubator, as well as by intersecting required areas (see list in main syllabus) with organizational logics explored in the first phase of the semester.

A Business Incubator program is of particular interest to the problematic of formality and informality in architecture, and its capacity to accompany cultural and technological speed. Students will engage exercises that can direct to strategies that promote potential flexibility and adaptation of formalized bodies.


“CRYSTAL CLEAR” : Phase 01 : Catalytic Exercises

The Studio will study and explore models of structures related to snowflakes/frost/ice-crystals, and derive models of organizational logics which suggest strategies of rhythm and detail creation that can be further developed to deploy the Incubator program on site.
Snowflake formation models include combinations or variations of DLA (Diffused Limited Aggregation) growth rule-sets , fractals and other factors which attempt to account to extremely entwined circumstantial/environmental factors. In spite of its often apparently symmetric and seemingly “engineered” structure and appearance, each snowflake or ice-crystal or frost morphology is a scar that tells news of the different encounters with different factors from their origin at a particular height in a particular cloud, to their packing ratio on the ground.
As well, Snowflakes have parts of their structure explored by a-scalar models such as the Koch Curve, joining in this way a broader set of models which try to emcompass organizational models of material exchanges.

The objective of this phase is to look at the different geometrical logics in the different processes around the formation of snowflakes/ice-crystals and derive informative models of organizational logics that deal with repetition:
- aggregation
- distribution
- subdivision
- fragmentation
- tesselation
- densification/dissipation
- flexibility
- shared/alternating centrality and hierarchy

These actions and particular formations derived from them can be suggestive of innovative models of spatial organization to deploy the incubator program in the proposed context.