The design of this project took a full year and was the premier effort where shapes were mapped to forms and forms to conceptual attractors (which we then called “poles” using a field analogy). The field mappings were never given a GUI. The photos show one of the models which was both a study in the structure of the built form and a reference for the symmetry groups used. The form is derived from one regular polytope inside another of different symmetry but with the same dimension. The edges are linked and the linking forms the bounds of minimal surfaces. Such minimal surface interpolyhedra (the subset that forms infinite regular minimal lattices) are our basic vocabulary, though seldom used as literally as here.

The project was a competition for an art museum in Glasgow. The collection was permanent and stable and a driving requirement was that the building be highly specific to the objects. What we did was extract semiotic intent from the objects, and the relationships imputed by the curator to create a complex set of conceptual relationships, instanced physically in the layout of the collection. That set of conceptual relationships then determined the form of the built space.

That’s opposite from what we did thereafter. Here, the form was computed from the relationships as a test exercise. In our real projects, we used the form to affect behavior driven by conceptual relationships.

Twenty-two photos of this model and the five competition drawings here.