Emergent reefs

Abstract

The Emergent Reefs project draws on the potential that emerges from a coherent utilization of the environment’s inherent ecological structure for its own transformation and evolution, using an approach based on digitally simulated ecosystems and sparked by the possibilities and potential of large-scale 3D printing technology. Considering tourism as an inevitable vector of environmental change, the project aims to direct its potential and economic resources toward a positive transformation, providing a material substrate for the human-marine ecosystem integration with the realization of spaces for an underwater sculpture exhibition. Such structures will also provide a pattern of cavities which, expanding the gradient of microenvironmental conditions, break the existing homogeneity in favor of systemic heterogeneity, providing the spatial and material preconditions for the repopulation of marine biodiversity. Starting from a digital simulation of a synthetic local ecosystem, a generative technique based on multi-agent systems and continuous cellular automata (put into practice from the theoretical premises in Alan Turing’s paper “The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis” through reaction-diffusion simulation) is implemented in a voxel field at several scales, giving the project a twofold quality: the implementation of reaction-diffusion generative strategy within a nonisotropic three-dimensional field, and integration with the large-scale 3D printing fabrication system patented by D-Shape®. Out of these assumptions, and with the intention of exploiting the expressive and tectonic potential of such technology, the project has been tackled exploring voxel-based generative strategies. Working with a discrete lattice eases the simulation of complex systems and processes across multiple scales (including nonlinear simulations such as computational fluid dynamics), starting from local interactions using, for instance, algorithms based on cellular automata, which then can be translated directly to the physical production system. The purpose of Emergent Reefs is to establish, through strategies based on computational design tools and machine-based fabrication, seamless relationships between three different aspects of the architectural process: generation, simulation, and construction, which in the case of the used technology can be specified as guided growth.