Cork Habitat

Doğukan Şamdancı, Elif Bahar Okuyucu, Fatih Erdil, Hatice Melike Özbek

D’Archy Thompson, Scottish biologist and mathematician, points out that there is a deeper meaning in the shapes & patterns of nature that neither mathematic nor physic can explain this “something more” which leads to beauty. (Thompson, 1942, p.9) The “Beauty” manifested in fitness or adaptation. The form of an object reflects the forces of content. With Thompson’s words: “Form is a diagram of forces.” (Thompson, 1942, p.16) Causality creates the main flow of nature’s dynamics. “Survival of the fittest” principle is valid in every scale of it and creates geometry of order on many scales, a geometry of organized complexity. Michael Batty, British urban planner, has used the term “fractal geometries”, he mentions that the repetition of the order across many scales multiple times creates the irregular (complex) geometries which still have an order. (Batty, 1994, p.17). Nowadays Digital Tools support us to compute the forces of the content. Analysis of the content starts the domino effect and stimulates the form. The opportunity of animating the form, makes us discover the “unseen potential” of the content forces. The continuity which lies on the main principles of the computational design, can create “causality” as nature’s principle. Creative manipulation of these flows is the point that the designers focused. (Lynn, 1999) With the “Digital Turn” the medium of the design shifted from form-making to form-finding process with information exchanges. (Carpo, 2013). The current objective nowadays is to make the Second Digital Turn real. For this reason, using digital tools as a new thinking style (Carpo,2017) has been aimed by the design group.
During the design process of Spirala Community House, the principles which were mentioned, have been tried to apply to the process. According to the decision scale (as settlement or building or component), creative manipulation of the usage of the data which are collected from scripts has shaped the design process. As a fractal principle, the reflections of the information which is collected from the same script (as water flow diagram & radiation analysis) but in different scales, creates the variability. In other words, the project has used the same rules in different scales to solve the complex relations of the system and aimed to create organized complexity as nature’s designs.