Project Index
A partial sampling of work generated by BlackBox members from 2006-2014
ADNEC Arena, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Principal BlackBox contributor: Justin Nardone
This project was generated as a competition proposal. Like many projects in the office that incorporate complex geometry, the modeling process for this project began with a parametric model of the overall form, in this case a flattened ellipsoid dome. This master control surface is then used to test different strategic approaches to creating an ideal gridded discretization of the dome surface, weighing mainly aesthetic and constructibility considerations. Once the grid concept began to come into focus, it was translated into a 3-dimensional structural system (maintaining parametric relationships to the master control surface). Different concepts for cladding the surface with semi-repetitive panels were explored before finally settling on a concept using diamond shaped panels that cerated a "dimpled" look and used the depressed dimples to provide controllable daylighting.
Ali Al-Sabah Military Academy, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia
Principal BlackBox contributors: Josh Ingram, Charlie Portelli, Keith Besserud
This was the project that started it all, leading eventually to the formation of the BlackBox group. In the summer of 2005 the New York office of SOM funded an initiative to allow teams of PAE students to apply their nascent computational skills on live projects in the office The first team consisted of 3 students: Josh Ingram, Charlie Portelli, and myself. The project was a military academy in Kuwait, and the design was well into schematics when our team was asked to focus on the optimization of a fenestration concept for the entire campus. The SOM design team wished to see a range of possible design solutions that minimized incoming solar heat gains while maintaining desired levels of natural daylighting, tuned to each of the four possible exterior wall orientations (N, S, E, & W). In order to do this, our team wrote a Genetic Algorithm, which is a type of search algorithm, and built a computational framework that also included a parametric geometry model of the prototypical window and a simulation program for measuring insolation levels.
Avant Garde, Moscow, Russia
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Will Corcoran
The request from the SOM design team was to help them understand how the massing and siting of 5 towers on a development parcel would affect solar access to the ground plane around the towers. The location was Moscow - a very cloudy climate - and so the desire was to try to maximize the amount of sunlight reaching the gardens and open spaces that were planned for the project. The 5 building footprints were fixed and so was the total GSF for the project, but the number of floors in each tower was flexible (within limits) and the design team was also willing to allow the towers to lean a certain amount out of plumb. In order to quickly generate a variety of different design solutions that all performed near-optimal with respect to the goals and constraints, the BlackBox team used the Genetic Algorithm to search through thousands of possible design solutions to find the best performers.
BioPods
Principal BlackBox contributor: Josh Ingram
This competition-winning scheme for a personal work station leveraged a robust parametric geometry model that allowed the designer to quickly study variations of the overall proportions of the egg-like form, as well as variations of the perforations on both the outer and inner shells.
Burj Khalifa - Lobby Ceiling, Dubai, UAE
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Justin Nardone
In this collaboration between BlackBox and Gehry Technologies, parametric geometry models were used to aid the process of designing a highly complex wood ceiling and facilitating its fabrication and installation, based on several constraints, including the physical limitations of the wood materials.
Chicago: City of Big Data Exhibition, Chicago Architecture Foundation
Principal BlackBox contributor: Matthew Shaxted
For an exhibition mounted by the Chicago Architecture Foundation called "Chicago: City of Big Data", the BlackBox team was asked to help create an interactive data visualization experience for visitors in order to provide a highly visual means of accessing and exploring some of Chicago's data. The project was a collaboration between BlackBox and a User Interface design firm called TruthLabs; BlackBox created the immersive 3D model of the city, the data integration, and the data visualization concepts while TruthLabs created the site navigation and data interaction concepts, as well as a unifying aesthetic for the skin. The featured datasets included origin-destination data for the city's Divvy bikeshare program, location and timestamp data from a year's worth of Twitter posts, and a year's worth of call log data from the city's 311 call database. The data visualizations were overlaid on the 3D model, providing the ability to scroll through time and see how different areas of the city generated different data "stories".
Cold Bent Glass Research
Principal BlackBox contributors: Keith Besserud, Arek Mazurek
As geometry modeling software has made it easier and easier to explore non-planar building forms, SOM designers have been actively conceiving building forms with subtly complex surface curvatures. In order to actually build those facades from curtainwall panels, a cost-effective technique has emerged in the last decade called "cold-bending", in which the panels are fabricated in the typical flat condition and then coerced into a warped condition during the installation process on the building facade. In order to better understand the behavior of the glass, aluminum, and sealants that are used in a curtainwall panel when cold-bent and the exposed to long term weatherization, SOM BlackBox collaborated with Dow Corning, Viracon, and Permasteelisa to conduct a research investigation that yielded an important white paper.
Corporate Campus Dashboard
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Matthew Shaxted
A multi-national corporate client had enlisted SOM to help with some strategic planning with respect to its spatial assets across multiple campuses. As part of that effort, BlackBox created a prototype of a "performance dashboard", leveraging technologies that had been developed for the "Chicago: City of Big Data" exhibit and for the Project Earth initiative. The dashboard provides an intuitive, user-friendly interface to allow people to quickly zero in on a specific location and reference charts and other visualizations of any dataset that is of interest to the user, from basic things like the total square footage of the campus, the number of workers, the profitability of the operations, etc. to more sophisticated and even real-time metrics such as energy consumption, labor statistics, and productivity statistics. Statistical comparisons between campuses are equally accessible, allowing leaders to immediately spot various types of "red flags", or to set targets and warning thresholds that are highlighted automatically when they are approached.
Happy City
Principal BlackBox contributors: Josh Ingram, Keith Besserud
Recognizing the organic quality of urban growth and decay, BlackBox attempted to create an agent-based model that was capable of simulating this "bottom up" phenomenon, as a counterpoint to the more "top down" approach of typical urban design master planning processes. The intended purpose of the modeling framework was to facilitate the study of the effects of both bottom-up and top-down parameters on the growth of cities, using a concept of the "happiness" of the buildings as the primary driving metric. In this simulation game, there are multiple building types (i.e. residential, commercial, retail, institutional, etc.) and each type is encoded with a unique set of preferences that determine its state of happiness at any point. For this proof-of-concept effort, the factors that drove happiness included the age of the building, its proximity to green spaces, its slenderness ratio, and the mix of building types in its immediate vicinity. The game played out in iterative steps, with a new building added to the grid at each iteration and a new calculation of happiness run for every building. The higher the building's happiness score, the more it grew; conversely, the less happy the more it decreased in height. If the building were sufficiently unhappy, it would "die off" and the parcel would be freed up for a new building to grow.
Hexagon Tiling Patterns
Principal BlackBox contributor: Josh Ingram
This design exercise was an example of a space-filling tiling algorithm that was capable of creating emergent complexity from a small number of simple procedural rules. The generative script starts with a single six-sided hexagon-like tile with semi-random edge lengths. It then generates the next adjacent tile by aligning to the right edge of the previous tile and then semi-randomly determining the lengths of the remaining edges, and so on and so on. In the rows above the bottom row, each tile has to match the edges of the previous tile as well as two of the edges below. What emerges from the script are beautiful geologic-looking patterns.
Holiday Card
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Josh Ingram
BlackBox was asked to develop artwork for several of the Chicago office's holiday cards, including this one in 2008. The algorithm for this card takes the vertices of a hexagonal boundary and several points (representing global regions where the office was active with design projects) as the primary driving input parameters. It then runs a recursive, semi-random function to create triangular subdivisions within the hexagonal border, creating a look that is reminiscent of crystalline structures. Each time the algorithm was run it generated a unique pattern. The pattern was then etched into plexiglass ornaments and included in the holiday card.
Imperial College, London, UK
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Neil Katz
As part of a contract to provide master planning services for this client, SOM created a visualization of the university's database of spatial asset information, including the floor area and departmental affiliation of every room on the campus. BlackBox was engaged to write scripts that automated the processes of reading the database and then color-coding CAD floor plans to communicate the departmental affiliation of every room. This was the first step in what was envisioned as an interactive platform that would allow university administrators and planners to visualize and analyze any number of datasets and metrics about the university's buildings and spaces.
Jellyfish
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Josh Ingram
In this design/ UI research project that had implications for interactive space planing tools, spatial "jellyfish" could be manually pushed around on the screen. As they came in contact with one another, they would turn colors to communicate their satisfaction or dissatisfaction, metrics that could be tied, for example, to programmatic spatial affinity information.
Jumeriah Gardens, Dubai, U.A.E.
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Will Corcoran, Josh Ingram, Heechan Shin, Britt Woolf
For this project, BlackBox members exercised their parametric modeling and solar insolation analysis skills to help multiple design teams iterate toward better performing design solutions for various solar shading design concepts. The project encompassed a six-block site, with each site hosting a tower and podium building. Six different design teams were enlisted to each set a design direction for their project. For each project, the Blackbox team created a parametric model that allowed key dimensional parameters of each design to be quickly changed so that it was easy to generate multiple variations of a concept. Then each design variation was run through a solar analysis program to determine how effectively each design was able to reduce surface heat gains. A healthy competitive dynamic emerged amongst the design teams during the course of the project in which the review meetings became judgement forums to see which teams were developing the most effective solutions.
King Abdullah City for Atomic and Renewable Energy, Saudi Arabia
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Justin Nardone, Heechan Shin
The scope of this project was for the design of a major new city in the desert outside of Riyadh. The dominant landscape feature of the site was a wadi system, the natural rivulets that were formed by the intense storm water events that occur periodically. This topography was used as a "data field" that drove a number of analytical and generative processes: solar insolation analysis revealed the cooler and the hotter slopes of the site; slope analysis provided an understanding of the regions of the site that were "buildable" and those that were too steep. In addition, a generative script was developed that read the topography data and generate a set of pathways based on a set of specified angles of descent. This created a mapping of paths suitable for pedestrians, paths suitable for bicycles, paths suitable for transit, and paths suitable for vehicles, all layered on top of each other to suggest possible locations for multi-modal station nodes.
LakeSIM
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Keith Besserud, Matthew Shaxted
During the course of developing a master plan for an ambitious brownfield redevelopment site on the south side of Chicago, called Lakeside, the sustainability goals for the project led the SOM design team to tackle the design of the development's infrastructure systems. One of the keys to designing a sustainably low-carbon infrastructure system is to understand the interactions and interdependencies between the various systems (electricity, heating, cooling, storm water, sewage, etc.), especially transfers of heat energy, however there are no good modeling tools for capturing this level of complexity and making it easy for designers to see the implications of various design ideas and system choices on the overall performance with respect to both carbon and dollars. For that reason, BlackBox proposed the development of a modeling framework that would enable these kinds of simulations. Argonne National Lab, which was a collaborator on the project, then took the concept and has begun the development of a prototype, called LakeSIM.
Laws of Attraction
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Keith Besserud
Any project that has a complex program, such as a hospital or convention center, requires a lot of study by the designer in the earliest stages of design to arrive at possible solutions for the layout of all the spaces and to make sure it supports the desired workflows of the client. The goal of this speculative project was to automate the process of reconciling all the affinity requirements of a complex program into spatial patterns that would begin to suggest room arrangements for a floor plan.
Nanchang Tower, Nanchang, China
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Josh Ingram, Heechan Shin, Justin Nardone
BlackBox members contributed to many aspects of the conceptual and technical development of this project, which encompassed a pair of mirrored towers. These contributions included: the generation of the overall tower form; parametric modeling of the overall building and specific features such as the curtainwall, the crown, and the main entry canopy; and analytics & optimization of the structural systems, the curtainwall, and the panelization of the crown features.
Oasis Generator, Dubai, U.A.E.
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Heechan Shin, Wei Wang, Justin Nardone
This project won an Architectural Record Research Innovation award, and was posited as a sustainable machine for creating oases in coastal desert locations. BlackBox created a number of highly robust parametric models that allowed the design team to explore an extremely wide variety of design variations for the project. Design variables for the parametric model allowed for variability in the number of spiraling structural ribs, the dimensional properties of those ribs, the rate of spiraling, and the overall profile of the tower, as well as similar aspects of the roof structure. The digital model was also leveraged for structural and solar analysis, as well as for the creation of a physical model.
Olympic Dining Hall, Chicago, IL
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Heechan Shin
SOM helped the city of Chicago with the planning of the Olympic Park in the City's bid proposal for the 2016 Olympic Games. This particular project was for the conceptual design of the main dining hall of the athletes and consisted of a large flexible clear-span space, structurally supported with a series of pneumatically inflated arches. For these conceptual studies, the design Partner created a small cardboard model to convey the conceptual intent, and then BlackBox created a parametric model that allowed for variation in the top an bottom profiles of the arches, the key dimensional parameters, the number of ribs, and the start point and end point locations of each arch.
Park Hotel, Hyderabad, India
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Josh Ingram, Charlie Portelli, Keith Besserud
BlackBox members contributed to this project while they were still students at the Stevens Institute of Technology, assisting the project's design team in the New York office of SOM. The charge was to design a perforated metal screen wall for the facade of a high-end hotel that negotiated issues related to solar heat gains, daylighting, and the need for views outward from the various programmatic spaces. The BlackBox team cycled through 3 fundamentally different approaches to solving the design problem, ultimately advancing with a concept that incorporated an understanding of punch press technologies to drive the perforation design.
PolyTop
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Matthew Shaxted
SOM has enjoyed a long and productive research relationship with professor Glaucio Paulino at the the University of Illinois at Urban Champaign (and his students) for many years. One of the creations of the Paulino team was a program called PolyTop, which is a topology optimization algorithm that runs in MatLab. SOM structural engineers were very interested in the program, but not many of the engineers were fluent with MatLab, so BlackBox was engaged to create a new user interface for PolyTop that was more accessible to the general engineering population. The result was an app-like browser-based program that required very little formal training and allowed engineers to quickly set up a variety of design problems with different boundary conditions, support conditions, and loading conditions, and see the optimal forms in a matter of a few minutes or less.
Procedural Vines
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Josh Ingram
This research initiative explored the use of bitmap images as a source of input data for an agent-based generative algorithm. Any bitmap is simply a collection of pixels, with each pixel holding 3 numerical values which correspond to the red, green, and blue (RGB) values of that pixel which together define the color of the pixel. In this algorithm, a bitmap image is first brought in as a background, and then a single seed for a vine is planted at a random location on the screen. The seed then immediately reads the RGB values of the pixel and uses those values to determine its next step: the 'R' value determines the direction of growth for the vine; the 'G' value controls whether the vine splits into two; and the 'B' value determines whether the vine sprouts a leaf.
Project Earth
Principal BlackBox contributor: Matthew Shaxted
In an effort to push the envelope with respect to large scale master planning, the New York office of SOM conceived an initiative to explore a hypothetical master plan for the entire Earth. In order to facilitate the story-telling aspects of this project, BlackBox created a visualization platform that used a model of the globe as a data visualization canvas and the means to easily integrate any dataset that references proper geospatial coordinates. The intent was to also use the model as a design canvas, allowing designers to sketch proposed master planning graphics and diagram right onto the model surface as another set of data layers.
Silver State Arena, Las Vegas, NV
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Justin Nardone
This project emerged shortly after the ADNEC Arena project. Because of the programmatic similarity between the 2 projects and the parametric robustness of the original ADNEC model, BlackBox was able to go back to the ADNEC model and modify a number of key parameters to create a dome that adjusted to the dimensional requirements of the Silver State project and was able to generate a much different design aesthetic.
Solar Tower Form Optimization
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Josh Ingram, Keith Besserud
In this research project, BlackBox explored the generative capabilities of the Genetic Algorithm they had previously created, as well as a commercially available optimization software program called HEEDS. The goal of the optimization that used the GA was to find an ideal shape for a building on a site that experienced shading from adjacent building, with a goal of maximizing incident solar radiation on the surface of the building (for harvesting solar energy). The building was constrained to a fixed total GFA, and a max and min floor area for each floor. In the exercise using HEEDS, there were 2 conflicting goals: maximize the incident solar radiation striking the building, but also minimize the surface area of the facade. The HEEDS optimization yielded a "pareto frontier" which identified the set design solutions that were the best solutions for the combined trade-offs of each goal.
Space Planning Tool
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Michelle Swanson
This prototype program was envisioned as a single purpose tool to make it easier to do "blocking" exercises for early stage space planning efforts. Instead of the traditional game of rearranging inflexible paper rectangles that represented the individual spaces of the spatial program, this prototype tool provided virtual rectangles that were parametrically stretchable, always maintaining the programmed square footage. The designer begins the process by preparing an Excel spreadsheet with all the spaces, their departmental affiliation, the target square footage, and the desired affinity to other spaces. The program then reads the Excel file and generates a default bubble diagram of all the spaces, scaled accurately, colored according to their department affiliation, and "rubber-banded" to other spaces according to the affinity definitions (the fatter the rubber band, the stronger the affinity). The designer could then load a scaled floor plan or building footprint, and begin rearranging the rectangles to begin to quickly study possible spatial arrangements.
Tanggu Convention Center, Tianjin, China
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Josh Ingram
For this project, BlackBox was asked to collaborate with the architectural design team and the structural engineers to structurally optimize a conceptual roof form that had been conceived intuitively by the architects. Blackbox built a numerically adjustable model of the undulating roof form and then used the genetic algorithm to search for the roof form that was the most efficient with respect to the flows of structural forces. The optimization process was constrained to keep any dimensional deviations from the original surface to within 5 meters up or down. In the end, the design team went with a form that was somewhere between the original form and the optimal form that was identified in the optimization process.
Tianjin New World Tower, Tianjin, China
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Justin Nardone, Heechan Shin
For this project...
United States Air Force Academy, Colorado Springs, CO
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Josh Ingram, Sonal Beri
For this project, BlackBox was enlisted to help with a design competition for a new building on the US Air Force Academy campus. During the conceptual design stage, the BlackBox designers conceived a faceted, pinecone-like shape and built a parametric model to study variations of several key parameters that determined the shape.
University of Chicago, Chicago, IL
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Matthew Shaxted
Planners at the University of Chicago were interested in getting a better understanding of pedestrian patterns across the university campus and so they commissioned a project to get students to share their travel patterns. A website was created where students could voluntarily draw their traversal paths from the previous day on top of a map of the campus. The data was aggregated over period of about a week, and then BlackBox was given the data and created a visualization within a 3D model of the campus, immediately revealing the the heaviest pedestrian corridors on the campus. In fact, a heavily used access point to the main quad was previously not recognized, leading to a design exercise to create a plaza that better supported the vital access point.
White Magnolia Plaza, Shanghai, China
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Josh Ingram, Britt Woolf, Heechan Shin, Justin Nardone, Joel Putnam
BlackBox support on this project consisted primarily of parametric modeling of the highly complex geometries. The modeling began at the earliest stages of conceptual exploration for the tower, the crown feature, the main entrance canopy, the podium, and the pavilion, and then extended all the way through detailed technical design for the tower curtainwall, the crown, the canopy, the podium cladding, and the pavilion enclosure.
Wujiang Tower, Wujiang, China
Principal BlackBox Contributors: Heechan Shin, Justin Nardone
Like many other projects that incorporated highly complex and curvilinear geometry, BlackBox skills were enlisted on this project to parametrically model the buildings, to manage adjustments to those models, to run certain types of performance analytics, and to guide the design of the various components to technical resolutions.
Xi'an Tower, Xi'an, China
Principal BlackBox Contributor: Matthew Shaxted
The proposed design of the floor plates for this tower project incorporated a sawtooth perimeter, and the design team asked BlackBox to help them understand how certain design variables would affect the energy performance of the building. The design variables included: the number of sawtooth elements on each facade; the plan angles of each leg of the sawtooth, the glass type for each leg, and several dimensional variables for vertical shading fins. Furthermore, these variables were allowed to be set independently for each facade, as opposed to enforcing the same design for all 4 facades. The combinatorial math for all these variables meant that there were over 15,000 possible unique designs that could be generated from this set of parameters. In order to test the energy performance of every single one of these designs, BlackBox set up a "parametric sweep" exercise, using a framework they had developed that leveraged parallel computing in the cloud. In a single overnight run, all 15,000 energy simulations were run, allowing the designers to see the best performing design solutions, as well as their preferred solution, and a bounty of additional solutions.
