DRAFT OF DRAFT

Self-assembly can be generally defined as the process in which a disordered system of pre-existing components forms an organized structure as a consequence of specific local interactions among the components and with no human intervention.

My project speculates in utilizing self-assembling technologies and chemical interactions to generate a system of migrating architectures. The site is Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a giant accumulation of man made debris suspended in the waters of the north pacific ocean, calculated to be roughly twice the size of Texas. The patch, conformed 80-90% out of plastic materials, is mostly formed by rubbish dumped from the U.S.A.’s west coast and from Japan and is gathered together by the North Pacific Gyre, a system of prevailing currents that collects the debris forming the patch. Through chemical interactions, these floating migrating architectural elements would self assemble in and around the patch to collect, trap and bind together all the floating plastic and marine litter, creating a new unique, floating construct.

There are a number of reasons for which self-assembly has generated such interest and although definitions of the term vary immensely and the subject has not been formalized, resulting in it being sometimes overused and distorted, we are undeniably intrigued by the spontaneous appearance of order from disorder. Living cells self-assemble, so the understanding of life and it’s basic building blocks would require the understanding of self-assembly processes. Also, it has been considered fundamental in the development of nanotechnology and the fabrication of nano-structures. Biological systems as well as a variety of inorganic physical systems exhibit self-assembling or self-ordering behavior and involve components from the molecular (crystallization) to the planetary scale (solar systems and weather patterns). Drawing on these systems for inspiration, scientists and professionals from numerous disciplines like chemistry, biology, engineering, and mathematics, to name a few, have begun to investigate the self-assembly phenomenon in hopes of learning to design and control the behavior of these systems. My interest is to study and speculate on the potentials of self-assembling systems and processes on an architectural scale.

Last term, I created an experimental model to study the basic aspects and conditions of self-assembly and parallel to this created drawings that would investigate and speculate on the potentials of this processes.I intend to continue the experimentation with the model and to incorporate into the project a speculative narrative of a social-cultural aspect, a ‘self organized social structure’ that develops on this newly created land, a micro-nation that is born from the rubbish and discarded material of other countries.

CAPT. CHARLES MOORE TED TALK

ARCHITECTURAL POTENTIALS

My project speculates in utilizing self assembling technologies, chemical interactions and new materials to generate a system of migrating architectures. I chose two test sites for the proposal; the first is the city of Shenzhen in the coast of China, a city that in the past 20 years has almost doubled it's size via land reclamation from the sea; and the second is Great Garbage Patch, a giant patch of garbage and debri floating in the north pacific calculated to be roughly twice the size of Texas, gathered together by North Pacific Gyre.

In the first scenario, the floating architectures would be released in the bay and self assemble in the coast, certain aspects of their behaviour and location would be predetermined, but the stchastic nature of the system would permit a more natural response to the problem of land reclamation. Instead of imposing and 'breaking' the environment, this solution adapts to the surroundings and the environment with a much lower impact on the local ecologies.

In the second scenario, the floating elements would follow the same route that debri follow from the coasts of the U.S. and Japan guided by the North Pacific Gyre, though chemical processes they would release protocell technologies that create a web or a net, and as they self assemble they would trap in this net the marine debri and supended plastics. A third situation uses the oceans as a test site. Since the sea has a concentration of CO2 up to 50 times larger than the atmosphere, the floating architectures, moving by chemotaxis would find the areas with highest concentration of CO2 in the ocean and via carbon capture processes reduce the CO2 content in theat particular area. Once the floating elements gain a cetain size, a 'critical weight', assemble at the coasts and sink, generating new underwater strata that would serve as scafolding for new ecologies to develop around them.

Abstraction drawing of the Self-Assembly process: A disorganized system of particles

spontaneously self-assembles into and ordered construct.

Drawing showing photosensitive protocells.

This drawing shows protocells self-assembling into a net that traps marine debri.

Migrating architectures are deployed in the coastal chinese city of Shenzhen, where they achieve land reclamation through stochastic self assembly processes.

Above: Migrating architectures follow the currents of the North Pacific Gyre and

self-assemble around the Great Garbage Patch while creating a net to trap floating debri.

Below: The objects move by thermotaxis and chemotaxis reaching the areas of

the ocean with highest CO2 concentration.

Time based drawing showing the increase in size of the elements due to carbon capture.

BROWNIAN MOTION

Brownian motion is defined as 'the seemingly random movement of particles supended in a fluid (i.e. a liquid or gas) or the mathematical model used to describe such random movements, often called particle theory.'

I generated a Brownian Motion curve for each tile in the model by tracking the movement of the particle, pin-pointing it's possition at different time intervals and conecting the points.

Each one of the images above represents the Brownian Motion of one tile achieved by tracking

the movement of the tile with intervals of 10s (cyan), 20s (blue) and 30s (red).

Mosaic of stills used to generate Brownian curves.

MODEL V2.0

This round of tests were more focused on programing the environment of the model and trying to manipulate the particles as little as possible. The environment (watter) was altered in three different ways; for the first two, I added Sodium Bicarbonate to make the water an alkaline solution and covered the tiles with oil. For the first one of these two experiments the water was moxed with the Sodium Bicarbonate at room temperature; for the second one I created a super-saturated solution by boiling the water beore adding the Sodium Bicarbonate and then letting it cool down.

In the las set of experiments, I wanted the environment to be as 'active' as posible reducing the need for me to intervene as an actuator when the system reaches equilibrium for this I added large quantities of effervescent salts. The video below shows a few clips of the results of all experiments (including some of the ones published before in this blog, so jump to 1:18 in the video to see the new bits).

THE MODEL

In order to explore the self assembly process, I constructed an experimental platform attempting to study the basic aspects, conditions and behaviours of a self organizing system. The Model consists of floating tiles in a water tank (since the components in the structure need to be mobile, the self assembly process usually takes place in fluid environments), using capillary interaction and magnetic fields as binding forces. The material used for the tiles is balsa wood and they were developed in two different sizes (1cm x 1cm and 2cm x 2cm), the coloured tiles used for the magnetic forces experiments have a pair of magnets each with all red tiles having the north pole of the magnets on the top and the black ones on the bottom, this makes tiles with the same colour repell each other and attract with those of the opposite colour. In both cases I acted as actuator sometimes slightly pushing the tiles around when the system achieves equilibrium and other times by just shaking the water tank trying to avoid direct manipulation of the model as much as possible.

SURFACE TENSION AND CAPILLARY INTERACTION

Surface tension is a property of the surface of a liquid. Since the molecules at the surface don't have other like molecules on 'all sides' of them, the cohesive forces that hold them together to the molecules associated with the surface are stronger. This forms a surface 'film' which makes it more difficult to move an object through the surface than to move it when it is completely submersed, the deformation of the liquid surface (which is supposed to be flat) is the origin of lateral capillary forces. This forces cause the attraction of two similar particles floating on a liquid's surface (like cheerios floating in a bowl of milk). Two types of capillary forces can be identified: lateral flotation forces and lateral immersion forces. The former refers to particles that are freely floating over the surface of liquid (like the paper above) where the attraction of the particles appears because of the deformation of the liquid surface originated in the particle's weight. The latter refers to the attrction between particles that are partially immersed in the liquid (the cheerio) where the deformation of the liquid surface is related to the wetting properties of the particle surface, i.e. the position of the contact line and the contact angle.

THE SCALE PROBLEM

Naica Cave, Mexico. Translucent gypsum crystals of up to 11 meters and 55 tons have been found... the process is calculated to have taken about 400.000 to 500.000 years...

THE PROCESS OF CRYSTALIZATION

The crystallization process consists of two major events, nucleation and crystal growth. Nucleation is the step where the solute molecules dispersed in the solvent start to gather into clusters, when stable these clusters constitute the nuclei. However when the clusters are not stable, they redissolve. Therefore, the clusters need to reach a critical size called critical radius, in order to become stable nuclei. Such critical size is dictated by the environment (temperature,supersaturation, etc.). It is at the stage of nucleation that the atoms arrange in a defined andperiodic manner that defines the crystal structure. ("Crystal structure" is a special term that refers to the relative arrangement of the atoms, not the macroscopic properties of the crystal (size and shape), although those are a result of the internal crystal structure). The crystal growth is the subsequent growth of the nuclei that succeed in achieving the critical radius. Nucleation and growth continue to occur simultaneously while the supersaturation exists. Supersaturation is the driving force of the crystallization process, hence the rate of nucleation and growth is driven by the existing supersaturation in the solution. Depending upon the conditions, either nucleation or growth may be predominant over the other, and as a result, crystals with different sizes and shapes are obtained. Once the supersaturation is exhausted, the solid-liquid system reaches equilibrium and the crystallization is complete, unless the operating conditions are modified from equilibrium so as to supersaturate the solution again.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystallization)

In this drawing I show the time based process of molecules gathering into clusters, some of them dissolving back into the solution and some of them reaching the critical size and forming nuclei, that atract more molecules and generates the crystal growth, the proces follows the time/energy curve that is usually followed by this mineralization process.

READING: 'Translations from Drawing to Building' BY ROBIN EVANS

'...My own suspicion of the enormous generative part played by architectural drawing stems from a brief period of teaching in an art college. Bringing with me the conviction that architecture and the visual arts were closely allied, I was soon struck by what seemed at the time the peculiar disadvantage under which architects labour, never working directly with the object of their thought, always working at it through some intervening medium, almost always the drawing, while painters and sculptors, who might spend some time on preliminary sketches and maquettes, all ended up working on the thing itself, which, naturally, absorbed most of their attention and effort. I still cannot understand, in retrospect, why the implications of this simple observation had never been brought home to me before. The sketch and maquette are much closer to painting and sculpture than a drawing is to a building, and the process of development - the formulation - is rarely brought to a conclusion within this preliminary studies. Nearly always the most intense activity is the construction and manipulation of the final artifact, the purpose of preliminary studies being to give sufficient definition for final work to begin, not to provide a complete determination in advance, as in architectural drawing. The resulting displacement of effort and indirectness still seem to be distinguishing features of conventional architecture considered as a visual art, but whether always an necessarily disadvantageous is another question.'