My attraction towards architecture is its power to influence the lifestyle of tomorrow. The result is only a fraction of the design process undertaken to achieve it. The process is where my interest lies. I am eager to learn new methods of design that can help shape a better future.
Being a part of the [CPU]ai atelier, I gained interest in how we can combine computational design methods with modern methods of construction to achieve sustainable designs. During my masters, I was able to diversify my skill set from learning how to develop computational tools for design and assessment, to designing adaptive-reuse buildings, as well as parametric design and DfMA.
In my final year, I worked on an urban scale project (as a group of two), involving the redevelopment of Manchester’s Eastern Gateway. In the past century, Manchester’s weakly connected active/public transport system resulted in a switch to private cars. Thus, transport became the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the city.
Recognizing today’s global climate concern, and the urban accessibility on site as our key issues, we aimed to achieve a highly compact city that encourages active modes of travel. Through a computational design process we generated urban plans based on the distances between different programs. To create various urban patterns we created our own computational tool based on the ‘city as a complex system’ framework. These urban patterns were designed with an aim of lowering travel times to local amenities by controlling the street network and urban block sizes.
To achieve a zero-carbon city we aim to reduce the operational carbon used during motorised travel. We calculated the embodied energy of building typologies and balanced this by using solar power to generate energy, in order to lower energy use and total carbon emissions.
