FOLDING WINGS

On this Monday morning, I wanted to share what I hope is an inspirational design resource.  At this link, you will find a paper written by Japanese scientists in which they create  holistic and complete structures based on the folding wings of the Japanese rhinoceros beetle.  The scientific intent is to devise more efficient methods in which to first fold and then deploy structures for use in space travel.  They reference potential uses such as solar arrays, human shelter, etc.

What initially attracted my curiosity was this image.  While I did not understand it, there was something interesting about both the uniqueness of each line drawing and there was some sort of a relationship between them which I did not initially understand.  From an overlay of two of the drawings, I generated my drawing above.  More on that later.

My point in bringing this to your attention is, where are the architects?  Here we have scientists studying with great focus and insight how, exactly, a Japanese rhinoceros beetle folds and unfolds their wings.  They use what they learn to create a workable, three dimensional, holistic, efficient, rationalized enclosure.  And what a great form they have generated from what they learned by studying this small component of nature.  Their drawing reminded me of a Zaha Hadid enclosure.

My most recent exposure to one of Hadid’s buildings is the Jockey Club Innovation Tower at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.   It does not require much imagination to see somewhat similar geometric relationships between the beetle wing folding geometry and this building.  Did the Hadid team look at folding wings for geometric inspiration?  Was it simply someone messing around in Rhino?  Were they looking at sand dunes as they were shaped by the wind?  Maybe they were looking at the strata of rocks.  Who knows?

When this building opened, print and online publications featured pretty pictures in their pages.  And I guess the reason that these publications feature a building like this is to say, look at the unique forms, look at the fresh associations!  Their goal is to inspire those of us, me included, who are in the trenches every day.  Their purpose in publishing a building like this is to communicate, principally, to the rest of us, well, if this can be done, can’t you pick up your game a bit more?  And the answer is, yes we can, if we have more of a sense about how this was shaped.  But without this formative data, all we really can do is copy.  And copying a design without the a priori knowledge of the inception, is, unfortunately, pitifully common amongst designers.

I just think that these same architectural publications should not hesitate to publish a paper which documents how the folding wing of an insect is used to generate a holistic enclosure.  Do you ever see anything like this in the publications?  Never!  Yet the wing article is just as interesting as a building article:  both provide information on organic and interesting shapes.  And the wing article gives you more of the basic tools with which to generate your own design, rather than remedial copying.  (For more on this subject, see the page Provenance Quotient, for example, in which we call for a quantification of design authenticity.)

My drawing at the top of the page, is, I think, somewhat flat.  It borders on a representational two dimensional conventional artistry.  So to go beyond that, I generated my Drawing from Drawing above, which makes a contribution to the House Dress series.  Almost Ready To Build!

So from what just happened on this page, I hope that you are left with an inkling of the design power available to you when source data is consulted.  By modestly drilling down into the dataset, I was able to understand a generative geometry, which, after two cycles of drawing, I was able to generate something with a bit of uniqueness.  So if you find that your pencil is moving toward a geometry developed from the folding of an insect wing instead of the geometry of yet another colonial house, then that’s great!  Happy work week!

1.  NATORI M. C., SAKAMOTO Hiraku , KATSUMATA, Nobuhisa, YAMAKAWA Hiroshi, KISHIMOTO Naoko. Conceptual model study using origami for membrane space, structures : a perspective of origami-based engineering. Mechanical Engineering Reviews. 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10258/3869