Tornado Pavilion Simplexity, almost nothing, but human expanded abilities

Abstract

In the context of the fourth industrial revolution, not all regions have the same access to technology for project development. These technological limitations do not necessarily result in worst projects and, on the contrary, can stimulate creativity and human intervention to overcome these shortcomings. We report here the design of a small pavilion with scarce budget and an ambitious goal to qualify a space through tactical urbanism. We develop the project in a multidisciplinary partnership between academy and industry, designing, manufacturing and assembling Tornado Pavilion, a complex structure using combined HIGH-LOW technologies, combining visual programming with analog manufacture and assembly. The design strategy uses SIMPLEXITY with ruled surfaces strategy to achieve a complex geometry. Due to the lack of automated mechanical cutting or assembly, we used human expanded abilities for the construction; instead of a swarm of robots, we had a motivated and synchronized swarm of students. The pavilion became a reference for local population that adopted it. This process thus shows that less or almost nothing (Sola-Morales 1995), need not to be boring (Venturi 1966) but less can be much more (Kolarevic 2017).