Project Description
FROM THE ARCHITECTS:
The D-Bridge is a yet-unbuilt architectural project and experimental
structure that serves as an extension to a private gallery and residence
in the Philadelphia area. Our office worked in close collaboration
with facade and BIM experts, as well as several other fabricators
and consultants in the greater Philadelphia region. A design team of
between two and three worked on this project, primarily in the Summer
of 2014.
It is our intent to present the Bridge as a case study in small-office
technological design and information management. The desire to
design and construct a project like the D-Bridge grew from a BIM-like
philosophy that is a founding ethos of our office. The knowledge
and tact to execute the project grew from close collaboration with
contemporary BIM experts, as well as adopting tools and expertise
from the burgeoning open-source community around Rhino and
Grasshopper.
We were thereby able to transform our primary tool for geometric
control into our organizational system for the entire project–which
we used in totality from formal experiments, to visualization of
data, to coordination and design of building systems, to fabrication
management, to delivery logistics and construction scheduling. All
managed from within the software we already use for 3D modeling
and drawing.
The D-Bridge (Bridge) is a single-story, single-room, 1200SF building
that acts as an enclosure along a path between an existing residence
and an Art Gallery. The building is a thickened shell with canted
glazing and six door openings—it is environmentally controlled, and it
provides both a programmatic link between living and gallery spaces,
and a series of smaller, more intimate porch-like spaces around the
boundaries of the buildings.
The core feature of the Bridge serves as both its form and structure—in
this case, over 1000 laser-cut, folded cells made from flat sheets of
stainless steel (voxels). Each voxel is easily handled by an individual,
starting around the size of a shoebox (8”x8”x10”), up to about the
size of a lawnmower (32”x32”x14”). The voxels form a shell, a
pelt of sorts, which wraps the enclosed volume under a complex
honeycomb of tightly-interlocking, riveted-together metal parts. The
interior surface of this shell was the primary geometric component
onto which all other geometric controls were grafted and grew. The
edges of the shell fit snugly into the details of the adjacent buildings,
and it carries its load down to three legs which touch down in the
surrounding meadow. The overall shape of the shell was finely
controlled for its external connections, its internal constructability, its
structural capacity, the interior and exterior views it provided, and the
experiences inside and on site that it engendered.