Heliomorph
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Mendonca, Pietro Cornelio
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Mendonca, Pietro Cornelio. 2022. Heliomorph. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.Abstract
Heliomorph is an investigation in testing the feedback loop of using solar geometry for architecture’s ability to react, transform, and inform existing and new architecture. Heavily influenced by the work Ralph Knowles developed with the “Solar Envelope”, this thesis continues explorations of heliomorphism through multiple scales: from the urban fabric to the building, the room, and detail manipulations. Research in Heliomorphism leans on stereotomic massing, boolean operations, and chiseled carvings. Heliomorph infuses the scientific research with artistic precedents from Gyorgy Kepes, , Kurt Schuerdtfeger, and László Moholy-Nagy's work of shadow and light play allowing the investigations to expand beyond stereotomy and carves. The body of work explores temporality and animation through surface tectonics, and concepts of double exposure, among other surface and medium transformations.The technological developments of the last decade enable an unanticipated degree of precision and recursion, infusing new possibilities into a Ralph Knowles process and bringing questions of how we navigate the liminal space between data input and output. How can we responsibly use available data, establish parametric flows, and arrive at an architecture that is more than the result of data inputs? Heliomorph tests architecture that negotiates between the precision of data points and the contradictions between the city's spatial and social politics and the desire for buildings to reach impactfully sustainable, ecological, and cultural conditions.
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