Jolie Laide*
Non Axisymmetric Disruptions. Butchering Form and Verticality.
* Unconventionally facially attractive or magnetic. Literally, it means "pretty and ugly" but is not generally used in reference to ugliness; a more accurate translation would be unusual, flawed, or quirky good looks.
Instructor
Hernan Diaz Alonso
AT
Ivan Bernal
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai, Maria Jose Herrero
SCI-Arc
Spring 2014
The tower Jolie Laide, located in London, aims to challenge conventional ideas about mid-rise office buildings. Normally in conventional office buildings, the lower and higher floors are more expensive, in relation to their respective accessibility and nicer views. Thus, the middle floors of the building are sold much cheaper. The new program moves the public area, which traditionally has a bolder design, to the middle part of the building. This innovation kills two birds with one stone: providing the offices with more useful square footage and increasing the attractiveness of the middle floors.
To achieve our aesthetic goals, we have conducted a series of experiments with wax and water that were digitized in Maya through liquid simulation. The study provided us with the idea of layers with voids between them, which originate at the center of the structure and flow outwards, creating a succession of rooms and open areas. At the same time, the irregular floor plates create a sense of fluidity in the space.
Jolie Laide
Laminaria
The Marine Eco-tourism Center
Instructor
Pavel Kazantcev
AT
Andrey Shipilov
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai
FEFU
Spring 2011
Tourism has been gravitating towards areas where nature remains unspoiled and Zarubino has witnessed a surge in tourist activity. While tourism is a crucial contributor to the economy, it can also cause significant harm to the environment. Therefore, sustainable tourism practices are necessary to ensure the preservation of nature, which is intrinsically valuable. My Eco-tourism Center serves as an integration system that reconciles the interests of tourism with nature conservation. It offers an alternative to the current disorganized tourism system and promotes environmental protection, waste-free practices, using non-motorized vehicles, implementing training programs, and encouraging the development of ecotourism.
Solar Attached House
Net-Zero Houses for the FEFU on Russky Island
Instructor
Pavel Kazantcev
AT
Andrey Shipilov
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai
FEFU
Spring 2009
We have designed an attached house with solar heating for the federal university settlement in the city of Vladivostok on Russkiy Island. The project aims to make the most of the natural and climatic factors in the area to reduce operating costs.
Despite being located on the same latitude as Sochi, Vladivostok has an average annual temperature that is 10°C cooler, making winters more severe than even in Murmansk, which is located beyond the polar circle. During the winter season, the city experiences dry and cold continental air, resulting in frosty weather, plenty of sunshine, and minimal snow. Spring is long and cool, with frequent temperature fluctuations. Summers are warm and humid with high precipitation levels. Autumn is usually warm and dry with many sunny days. Monsoons drive the winds here, blowing from the north in winter and from the south in summer.
The house's architectural concept involves a vertical spiral centered around a hexagonal staircase. Not only does it serve as a "stiffening core" for the floors, but it also distributes solar heat and light throughout the house. Essentially, it acts as a skylight that maximizes its glass facade on the south side and is closed off by cold rooms on the north side, such as the kitchen, bedrooms, and bathrooms. This design allows direct sunlight to radiate the skylight throughout the day, making it an effective accumulator of heat. Moreover, its location in the center of the house provides warmth to the cold, northern part of the house. This design resembles the traditional Russian hut, where the Russian furnace played a crucial role. The furnace held a central position in the house and served as a source of heat, where people cooked their food and even slept on it. This heating system provided warmth to everyone during the long frosty winters despite on the cold and winds rampaged outside. The living room, entrance, and winter garden are connected to the stairwell in the south side of the house. The winter garden serves as a barrier to store and retain warmth The house also incorporates energy-saving elements, such as heating the thermal mass, which is commonly used in houses with passive solar systems. The dark stone floor and wall between the living room and stairs act as the thermal array, absorbing solar energy throughout the day and releasing it at night for space heating. The floor must remain dark to effectively generate and store heat. Special valves located in the window wall and roof skylight allow for air circulation to maximize solar radiation during daylight hours. The solar panels are angled optimally for the city of Vladivostok. We have created a house that is situated on an island within the city, where typical utility poses a challenge. We focused on optimizing the usage of natural heat and energy supply. Our goal was to design a building that serves as an efficient energy-saving system in itself.
...can Move Mountains
Study of Light and Motion
Instructor
Marcelo Spina
AT
Casey Rehm
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai
SCI-Arc
Summer 2014
Aiming at concepts of mirroring and motion, this project explores the fickle and whimsical reflections produced by solid volumes. The architectural object evolves through states of concealment and disappearance due to ever-changing projections and refractions through the use of mirrored surfaces. With the building reflecting and capturing images of the nearby environment, visual dialogues are created between the open and closed stages. The project challenges the primacy of visual effects and perspective as a form of recognizing and differentiating objects.
The project is situated in the Mojave Desert, a lifeless, non-urban landscape where the only artificial footprint is represented by the Ivanpah Solar Plan—the largest of its type in the world. The proposal programmatically encompasses an educational and research center, with a focus on energy, intended to emphasize the link between architecture and energy technology, and the emerging phenomena of a high-tech sublime. The concept of the center suggests that sun energy is not only a source of unlimited renewable power, essential to life in contemporary urban environments but actually a force, able to move a mountain. Appearing solid, monolithic crystal-like forms, embedded in the mountain, open up with light, engendering a new object as a result and a new figural space inside the figure. The building, in its closed position, remains static and concealed in its first phase of transition. Beams of light reflect off the solar cells and trigger two parts of the building to move, substantially altering its form and its relationship with the surrounding environment. The mirrored surfaces produce a disorienting yet engaging space in between reflections and refractions, deconstructing and morphing the building’s mass, continuously challenging and deviating visual perceptions.
...can Move Mountains
Acapulco EcoTower
Luxury hotel on Mexican shore
Instructor
Pavel Kazantcev
AT
Andrey Shipilov
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai
FEFU
Spring 2009
I have never been to Mexico but based on photos of the Mexican students I have created for myself the living image of this unique country with its different climate, picturesque landscapes, rich nature, original culture, and architecture. It wanted to create the architectural project of an eco tower that will not only decorate the Pacific pearl of Mexico - Acapulco but maximize the use of natural gifts such as the sea, sun, and wind to make life more comfortable. My purpose was not designing of the next tall building in the first line in front of the beach closing the relaxing seascape, but to create a living organism from a combination of the nature and latest achievements of the international architectural experience.
The Eco tower represents an unusual decision because it is supposed to be not on land but as a bright flower or a sailing vessel floating on the sea surface. The tower has a streamlined form that allows it to reduce the resistance to winds, its curvilinear forms allow to decrease quantity of the spent building materials and its curved shape help reduce the amount spent building materials and get the maximum usable area. The tower is composed of two halves, facing facades of the South and South-West, forming between them a multi-level atrium.
Intensive Inversions
The Stroy of 3d Print Caught in "Viccissitudinous* Event"
* “Vicissitude is a quality of being mutable or changeable in response to both favorable and unfavorable situations that occur by chance. Vicissitudinous events result from events that are neither arbitrary, not predictable but seem to be accidental.” Greg Lynn, Architectural Curvilinearity: The folded, the plant and the supple, Architectural Digest 63, no.3/4 (1993) 8-15.
Instructor
Peter Testa
AT
Rania Hoteit
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai, Anushka Jhavery, Abishek Sapkal, Pooyan Ruhi,
Dustin Columbato
FEFU
Fall 2013
The application of 3D prints as preforms rather than the final product of a digital model has far-reaching implications in regard to the formalist material and geometric studies. The 3d print is an example of combined yet discreet parts—they exist as individual pieces—lines and extrusions in our rhino or Maya model. When 3d printed these discreet forms combine to become a single entity through the elastic bondage of the 3d print material; in our case it's PLA. We have expressed this materialistic contradiction of discrete parts to whole continuous systems through a primitive, which seems to have been exhausted because of its perfect form. The surface of the sphere is reduced to a more concise vector-based system—that of a regular hexagonal lattice system. In other words, we chose a primitive that is definitive of continuity and wholeness; we chose it to exist in its most concise form; we chose it thus to set up a challenge: breaking this system of stability while blurring the line between discreet and continuous parts. So the breakage would not produce fragments but instead, yet another continuous system of yet indecipherable wholes and parts.
The geometric and material choices of the 3d printed preform are in themselves pregnant with tension. The external forces – heat and controlled stretching (via the robots) activate the viscosity embedded in our preform. “Vicissitudinous” events are designed into the preform via weak joints that hold the double sphere systems. The hypothesis is represented through a computer simulation which is then tested through real-time stretching. The conclusion, however, is drawn from a combination of both these systems. They run in parallel to give us completely different data sets that represent potential material and geometric glitches in our model. In this way, the digital and the real world are in constant dialogue for design improvements that facilitate our research toward geometric and material viscosity. The weak joints were initially used to simply hold a nested system together. Soon into the experiment, we realized they play quite an integral role in defining the result. So we went through a maniacal process of designing these joints—where they should be? How long? How thick? There is only one right answer before the joint breaks away because it is not strong enough, or breaks the whole preform because it is too strong. We beat the sphere’s stability problem, and, quite surprisingly got it to transform into other preforms (the embedded triple sphere system extended to become a triangle with no traces of the original preform). Similarly, we were able to manipulate different types of nested systems through an inversion of the excess material nested within the bounding box of the spheres.
Squished II: Metacomponents and Metaseams
On this course we were investigating the meta- possibilities of joints and seams, to become freeform, figural, and even fake, with the expressed intent of moving away from the homogenizing penalization promoted by parametric design. The open frontier of composite materiality and multi-materiality underwrote our work, where joints are no longer the site of hardware, but rather of interlocking, stitching, and gluing, and seams no longer index the beginnings and ends of pieces of material…
Instructor
Tom Wiscombe
AT
Curime Batliner
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai,
Mona Flehan,
George Smyrlis
SCI-Arc
Spring 2014
In this project we were inspired by the idea of stitches in a patchwork pattern. It is easy to get lost while studying the maze of seams in patchwork. In which places are the stitches practical, serving to hold the pieces of fabric tight? At which point does the stitching become purely decorative? Such a shift between function and form creates ambiguity, which is exactly what we were trying to achieve as the aesthetic idea of our project.
The fake seam has two purposes: one is practical - to hold the panels tougether; another one is decorative - the part of functional seam becomes completely aesthetic in purpose, which aims to misguide the spectator and create the false notion, that there are only two panels instead of three.
The pattern also mean to delude the observer to the erroneous perception of the panels.
We 3d printed the prototype to prove the concept, that 3 parts will fit together and only 2 stitches will hold 3 parts together reliably.
The supercomponents assembly is meant to be automated by robots or other machinery used on the construction site.
The supercomponents assembly and stitching is meant to be automated by robots or other machinery used on the construction site.
Kinetic Snake
On this course we were investigating the meta- possibilities of joints and seams, to become freeform, figural, and even fake, with the expressed intent of moving away from the homogenizing penalization promoted by parametric design. The open frontier of composite materiality and multi-materiality underwrote our work, where joints are no longer the site of hardware, but rather of interlocking, stitching, and gluing, and seams no longer index the beginnings and ends of pieces of material…
Instructor
Pavel Kazantcev
AT
Curime Batliner
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai, Mona Flehan, George Smyrlis
FEFU
Spring 2014
The surface of the “Kinetic Snake is a silicon rubber "Dragon skin", stretched over a frame of acrylic rings and hiding the mechanical inner workings. The aimed of using the distinctive skin-like material was to give the participant the tactile sensation of touching a living entity. The special system of joints was incorporated to the skeleton in order to create the wide range of motions by pulling the threads using servo motors.
The surface of the “Kinetic Snake is a silicon rubber "Dragon skin", stretched over a frame of acrylic rings and hiding the mechanical inner workings. The aimed of using the distinctive skin-like material was to give the participant the tactile sensation of touching a living entity. The special system of joints was incorporated to the skeleton in order to create the wide range of motions by pulling the threads using servo motors.
The prototype was constructed using commonly found materials such as acrylic, wooden sticks, vellum paper, staples, fishing thread, and an Arduino kit.
The frame was crafted using wooden sticks and acrylic plates, while paper rings were stapled together to form the tentacle. Aluminum tubes were used to prevent the collapse of paper rings and ensure a seamless movement. Threads were then attached to the motors by passing them through the tubes.
Coding Form
Exploring Parametric Modeling and Fabrication techniques
Instructor
Satoru Sugihara
AT
-
Team Members
Nikita Troufanov, Oksana Gritcai, Woongyeun Park, Brennen Huller
SCI-Arc
Fall 2013
Parametric Mural
Parametric Mural. Close up.
Parametric Mural. Close up.
Parametric Mural. Close up.
Parametric Mural. Close up.
Parametric Mural. Close up.
The Dream Lab
Unreal Engine 5 workshop. Interaction and Storytelling.
Instructor
Andrew Friedenberg ,
Hamze Machmouchi
Team Members
Oksana Gritcai, Christine, Jill, Jose
PAACADEMY
August 2022
Dream lab inc presents a dream space set in a disused church that manufactures, studies and produces dreams. Step into the Laboratory of Dreams and set out on a journey through a multitude of realms - both real and otherwise. Explore the lab, choose the dream you want to dream. Be lost, be wondrous. But remember, it’s okay to get lost, as long as you can come back....
Entrance to the DreamLab and also the exit, the Church is the protagonist of the story. Luring in people to come in and get lost in their chosen dreams, the Church neither traps them, nor wants to free them.
For some, the allure of the DreamLab was irresistible, drawing them deeper into its embrace with each passing moment. The blankets of comfort it offered wrapped around them, cocooning them in warmth and security. But what happens when comfort turns into confinement? When the dream becomes a trap from which there seems to be no escape?
Yet even in the midst of uncertainty, there was beauty to be found. Some dreams were so joyous, so filled with wonder and delight, that travelers longed to linger within them forever.
But the church reminded them gently - all dreams must eventually come to an end.
In the end, the DreamLab was a testament to the power of the human imagination, a place where dreams were born and cherished, where reality blurred and fantasy took flight. And though the journey may be filled with twists and turns, as long as one could find their way back, the adventure was always worth taking.
