The “shell”

competition: “Design It: Shelter Competition”_ Guggenheim Museum and Google SketchUp

team: Anastasia Fragkoudi, Dimitrios Raidis, Polina Ioakeimidou

The “shell” was a project designed for the competition “Design It: Shelter Competition” held by Guggenheim Museum and Google SketchUp in June-September 2009. The competition was an extension of Learning By Doing, an exhibition in the Guggenheim Museum Sackler Center for Arts Education that featured plans, photographs, and models of student-built shelters from the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. The project specs were the design of a small shelter 9.3 sq.m. for one person providing a place to study and sleep. The “shell” is a portable shelter consisting of three elements: the “canopy”, the “fan” and the “retreat”. 

It opens up gradually as a see-shell extending its components, transforming into a shelter. The transparent “canopy” incorporates shaders protecting the interior from the sun. The walls take the form of elastic fans and the interior is shaped from a moulded surface that is organized into a sleeping and a studying area.

According to the proportions and needs of the human body of the occupant the moulded surface of the interior can be customized without losing it’s primary character. The form and shape of the “shell” is neutral and characterless allowing it to adapt to any location and environmental context. 

venice biennale workshop_hyperhabitat_reprogramming the world (07/2008)

tutor: Institute de Arquitectura Avancada de Catalunya_Iaac faculty
students: Institute de Arquitectura Avancada de Catalunya_Iaac students
coordination: Institute de Arquitectura Avancada de Catalunya_Iaac

The aim of the workshop was to construct an installation for the Biennale di Venezia. The installation was the physical representation and interpretation of Hyperhabitat, a research project developed at the Iaac Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia.
Hyperhabitat studies the structure and logics of urbanity as a living organism and the connections and networks that are formed in this artificial environment. Every urban space is formed by nodes and networks; the nodes are the centers of attraction and the networks are the connections between them. Hyperhabitat studies the formation of urban environments and analyses them in terms of scale, analyses nodes and networks searching for common principles, connections, relationships that are similar to different scales of physical space. The aim is to extract principles and logics of creating urban environments in terms of sustainability and adaptation to variable social, economical and environmental issues.
The first stage of the workshop was the design of the physical space of the installation in Venice. Experimenting with different principles of design, testing the attributes of the material, designing the furniture, testing the internet 0 nodes were some of the things that the first stage of the workshop was involved in. The second stage was the construction of the installation at the Biennale di Venezia; assembling the furniture, programming the internet 0 nodes, testing the projections and so on until the whole installation was put together and ready to be visited in the opening day of the Biennale.

value land_diploma thesis_layer 2 (5/2008-06/2008)

tutor: Andres Jaque
students: Anastasia Fragkoudi

The concept of the diploma thesis is based on the issue of sustainability and how it is interpreted in daily life. Living in a sustainable way can’t exclude the basic element of people’s everyday life: the residence. Only by contemplating the microscale a concrete argument around the issue of sustainability can be made. The research started out by studying representative examples of contemporary and prefabricated dwellings around the world in terms of environmental impact, materials of construction, infrastructure, mobility, adaptability to environmental conditions, spatial organization, technology, context, spatial dimensions, etc. The aim of the research was to extract common elements and basic differences in both contemporary and prefabricated dwellings and to classify them.
Contemporary residencies are related to the way of life; nomads use portable dwellings, in third world countries people construct houses with materials that are inexpensive and are available in the area and so on. Some contemporary dwellings are related to a geographical context, they are adapted to environmental conditions, and some other are related to an intellectual context, they seem that they could be anywhere in the world.


Most of the prefabricated dwellings implement the latest technologies in an attempt to create the “zero energy” house; the residence that produces the amount of energy that it consumes. Some of them are built based on the minimum spatial dimensions needed to perform all the activities of a house unit. Others are built out of a prototype that can be customized depending on the needs of the customer.


The basic idea of the final project is to create a double skin; an exterior and an interior “cell”. The exterior “cell” provides all the needs of the interior “cell” (the house unit). The space in between becomes something like a threshold between the inside and the outside, the public and the private, the natural and the artificial environment. The exterior “cell” is equipped with photovoltaic panels, providing electricity for the house unit, and evacuated tube collectors, supplying hot water to the interior “cell”. Hot water is also used for underfloor heating and with the implementation of an absorption chiller hot water can also be used for cooling the house unit. The exterior “cell” provides also shading and ventilation since it can open up according to the environmental conditions and to the needs of the inhabitants. Grey-water treatment is another technology that was inserted to the infrastructure of the unit by implementing a wastewater recycling system.


The prefabricated house unit is constructed in parts that can be easily transported and mantled and dismantled on site. Flexibility of the design and adaption to environmental conditions is one of the qualities of the house unit. The inclination of the photovoltaic panels is a flexible element of the design in order to adapt to environmental conditions according to geographical location but also to the needs of the inhabitants.

developmental studio II_the self-sufficient building: romania case study (04/2008-05/2008)

tutor: Izaskun Chinchilla
students: Anastasia Fragkoudi

The theme of the developmental studio of the 3rd term of the master’s course focused in the issue of sustainability. The aim was to study daily activities and by embodying small changes in the daily life of the people how we can change reality. The final assignment was to produce a video that would embody our field research, the concept of the project and the design proposition.
After the research trip at Romania and the study of its capital Bucharest, each one of the students observed closely the daily life of the people of Romania and their physical environment. The thing that surprised me more was the fact that Bucharest had a very basic not to say insufficient waste infrastructure. So my concept for the studio project focused in the field of waste infrastructure.
Each household produces daily an amount of waste, paper, glass, plastic and metal, as well as wood, electrical devices, clothing and ceramics in a longer period of time. What if instead of dumping this waste all households could exchange their waste, recycle them and produce new products that could be used in daily bases. This small change in the way that the waste is treated can change the social and economical way of life of the people.
The module needed for the specific infrastructure network is composed by 8 units, a paper recycling unit, a glass recycling unit, a plastic recycling unit, a metal recycling unit, a wood recycling unit, an electrical device recycling unit, a clothing recycling unit and a ceramic recycling unit. The distance between the first 4 units is not more than 800-1000 meters and the time to go from one unit to the other is not exceeding 8-10 minutes on foot. The distance between the last 4 units is longer because wood, electrical devices, clothing and ceramic waste is not produced in daily bases in contradiction to paper, glass, plastic and metal waste. So the distance of the 4 last units is 2500-3000 meters and the time needed to go from one unit to the other is around 8-10 minutes by car. 5 elements, the household area, the waste storage area, the recycling area, the manufacturing area and the product storage area compose each unit. By multiplying the module one can have a different layer of interpreting the city of Bucharest in terms of waste infrastructure network.
Every unit is a kind of small “industry” having an input and an output. As input one can consider piles of garbage brought to the unit by garbage trucks and individual items brought by the people of the neighborhood. The output is recycled products that can be used in daily bases and customized products that can be ordered by every person around the world through the internet. Depending on the amount of waste gathered each day, recycled, manufactured, produced and sold each unit has a different function and nature each day.



Below you can find the youtube link of the video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Idnk0MaXsk

scripting II (04/2008-05/2008)

tutors: Carlos de la Barrera, Luis Fraguada
students: Anastasia Fragkoudi, Bagia Pantou

The aim of the scripting seminar was the students to get familiar with the logic of scripting and the potentials that it can offer in the design process of a project. The final assignment of the seminar was to create a roof for the installations of the Iaac institute. Our initial thought about the final assignment of the scripting seminar was to create a surface that would relate to the exterior environmental conditions. Orientation and sun radiation were taken into consideration from the very beginning of the design process. Relating the project also to the interior space other factors had to be considered such as the existing elements of the space; the fab lab installations, the complot space, the kitchen area, the lecture hall, etc. Starting designing the roof surface our aim was to create a skin that would act both as structural element and as shading device. Our first attempts involved the designing of a surface created randomly in order to start experimenting with script variations. By developing further the script our decisions started changing and more parameters started affecting the outcome of our project. Our intentions began to shift to another direction when we decided to create two individual skins; one acting as structural element and the other as shading device. This parameter would offer more design variations. Another factor that affected the design was the decision of creating a surface that would be generated from the floor of the space and growing towards the outer frame of the building. In that way the interior space would open to the exterior and vice versa; the exterior environmental conditions would be present in the interior of the building. These parameters were inserted into the scripting process.


By analyzing further the potentials of the script and the use of the space new parameters started being involved in the design process. Considering the function of the main space of the institute, which actually serves as an exhibition room and an event hall, lighting orientation should be taken into account. Exhibition halls need stable amount of light orientated towards the north. That parameter affected our scripting intentions in the sense that orientation should be included into our design. The entire roof surface would have dense points gathered on the south-orientated area in order to minimize sun radiation and less dense points on the north-orientated area so as stable natural light enters in the interior space of the building. An additional parameter for the next step would be the implementation of metrical units; height, width and length of the space, calculation of volumes and surfaces. Translating these parameters into scripting certain alterations occurred. The initial surface this time is designed according to metric parameters meaning the height, the length and the width of the space. The script divides the designed surface and curves are formed. On these curves, according to orientation, circles are formed with different radiuses. The pipes are formed through the lofting of these circles. After creating the structure of the skin of the roof a random division of the same initial surface occurs. On the curves generated through this division, circles of different diameter are formed according to orientation. The circles are lofted again in order to create pipes. These pipes are acting as the shading device of the skin of the roof.



In the link below you can find the script and the rhino file of the project
http://www.box.net/shared/sn7ranfcco

romania in & out (04/2008-05/2008)

tutors: Rodrigo Rubio, Daniel Ibaniez
students: Anastasia Fragkoudi, Bagia Pantou, Maria Papaloizou, Andrea Katsavra

The Romania In & Out seminar was a research course that followed a 6 day trip to Romania. The seminar aimed at interpreting the observations of our field research in Romania. The theme assigned to our group was demographics in relation with the social and economical status of the population of Romania. The research had to be developed in all 4 scales, XL, L, M and S.
For the XL scale our research was mainly based on the comparison of Romania with 3 other European countries (Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom) and on the major migration flows of the country and all the impacts of this tendency. The comparison was focused on demographic characteristics concerning: social: population and population structure (male, female, age), birth and death rates, education levels and occupational sectors, unemployment and poverty levels, crime rates, as well as economical characteristics: average salary and main costs of living in each country, such as price of bread, milk, metro tickets, petrol, housing properties, and the GDP per capita.



Concerning the migration sector, Romania shows great migration flows over the years, especially after the fall of Communism (1989). These flows are mainly related to all the differences observed in the social characteristics of the country’s population, concerning both the evolution of time and the comparison between the social statuses of the people. The emigration generally shows larger flows (mainly for the search of a better economic related life), while the immigration shows only specific moments of increase (mostly due to asylum and employment).



In relation to the other scales – L, M, S – we focused on analyzing migration flows: emigration (outflows), immigration (inflows) and rural to urban migration, and the reasons that cause these flows and the impacts that they have on the country’s social characteristics. In the diagrams and charts developed for these scales research had been made concerning the poverty level of the country compared to emigration flows, the occupation sectors of each region of Romania, the migration flows of the years between 1991-2007 related to social and economical events that occurred in the specific period of time, the social and economical reasons that affected the emigrations and immigration tendencies over the years and the statistics that are related to the standard of living.

research studio II_the self-sufficient building 100/1000/10000 (01/2008-03/2008)

tutor: Willy Muller, Max Sanjulian, Michel Rojkind, Bostian Vuga
assistant: Berardo Metalluci
students: Anastasia Fragkoudi

The subject of the research studio of the 2nd term of the master’s program was the design of a building of 10.000 people that each student would decide its use and location. The project had to be based on the issue of sustainability in all of its forms: social, economical and energetic.
The location of the project is Makkah, one of the bigger cities of Saudi Arabia and the most important religious place of Islam. Muslims revere the city for containing the holiest site of Islam, the Masjid Al-Haram (The Sacred Mosque) of Makkah. A pilgrimage to Makkah during the week of the Hajj is one of the Five Pillars of Islam.
The primary industry in Makkah in modern times is to support the annual pilgrimage of the Hajj, as well as to support the pilgrims who visit the city at all other times of the year. More than 2 million pilgrims annually head to Makkah for once in a lifetime ceremony. Saudi Arabia’s government has been criticized on the lack of services, accommodation and infrastructure provision. In our days many projects are under construction in Makkah since Saudi Arabia government planners in 2001 have approved the multi-billion dollar construction to more than double the number of pilgrims who can be accommodated around the immediate area of the Grand Mosque. Makkah is one of the few locations around the earth where a 10.000 people building has a purpose of being constructed.
A building designed to accommodate 10.000 people needs almost all the facilities of an urban environment. The basic element of the building is the residential section since it is designed to accommodate pilgrims that visit Makkah throughout the year. There are 3 bedroom categories: for one or two people (20 sq.m. unit), for three or four people (40 sq.m. unit) and for four or five people (60 sq.m. unit). Facilities provided for 10.000 people should include commercial spaces, service areas, open spaces and basically all the facilities that are part of the Islamic religion; meaning baths and swimming pools as well as areas that are dedicated only to prayer.
The spatial organization of the building is based on a circular pattern. The core of the building is the circulation. Around it commercial areas, service areas, open spaces and leisure activities are organized in the form of a circle. Religious areas and the residential cores are placed on the periphery of this volume in order to have more privacy.
The building is comprised by components. Each of the component “groups” the uses and facilities of the building forming zones of spaces with specific metric attributes. The components are embodying both the infrastructure of the building and the organization of the uses. The building consists of 124 floors and its overall height is 372 m. The uses are distributed in the whole volume instead of being gathered in specific areas. Every floor has a different percentage of each main use according to the sq.m. that it occupies each time.


Electric energy as well as the heating and cooling of the building are provided through geothermal energy. Electricity is produced through the "hot dry rock" geothermal process; first, high-pressure water in pumped to underground rocks and breaks them up, then water is pumped from the surface down through the broken hot rocks. When the water heats up, it is brought back to the surface through a second well and used to drive turbines for electricity. The grey water of the building after being treated in order to be pure and not pollute the underground environment could provide the water needed for the specific geothermal energy process.
For the heating and cooling of the building a geothermal heat pump system is used. The system operates based on the stability of underground temperatures; the ground a few feet below surface has a very stable temperature throughout the year, depending upon location's annual climate. A geothermal heat pump uses that available heat in the winter and puts heat back into the ground in the summer. A geothermal heat pump is a heat pump that uses the Earth as either a heat source, when operating in heating mode, or a heat sink, when operating in cooling mode.


The infrastructure of the whole building is organized in parts. There are four main components that embody both the structure and the infrastructure of the building organized vertically and horizontally. Vertically infrastructures are separated forming autonomous fields of “flow” transfer while horizontally infrastructures are mixed forming levels of “flow” networks. These four components follow a specific pattern of organization into space in order to ensure a constant infrastructure “flow” working in the form of a natural cycle. Component A is in the center of the cycle, six B components are attached to component A in such way that they can share only one vertical infrastructure “flow” while these six B components share two other vertical infrastructure “flows” in the form of a cycle. Components C and D are organized on the periphery of that cycle sharing only one vertical infrastructure “flow” depending on their position into space. Components C and D can also operate as individual separated units in terms of water infrastructure since they have two more vertical infrastructure “flows” that allow them to recycle grey water into their own unit; grey water is recycled on the bottom of the components and is pumped up on the top and distributed again through an additional vertical infrastructure water “flow”. In the horizontal axis all components share the same level of “flow” networks operating together.



The design of the building depends on the components. By piling up the component of the circulation the “movement” core of the building is generated. The commercial and service area components, six in number, are organized circularly around the circulation core following a rotation of 60o degrees from the centre of the volume. The residential area and the religious area components are attached in one side to the commercial and service area components staying in the periphery of the main core of the building. The structure piles up until it reaches 372 meters in height to serve the accommodational needs of the pilgrims.