The
Green Negligee project addresses the environmental and social problems of a Soviet
era collective housing district Petrzalka (population 115,000, density >
4000 persons/km2), in the Slovak capitol of Bratislava. It imagines
a novel spatial and systemic transformation that prioritizes local quality of
life and provides an alternative to the prevailing culture of consumption that
has arisen in Eastern Europe since the fall of communism and the transition from
collective ownership to a neo-liberal globalized economy. The Green Negligee is
a system that creates a thick, inhabitable boundary layer between the buildings
and the landscape. This new ground reintegrates the built environment and the
local ecology, serving as a host for alternative energy and material processing
systems. It creates microclimates that reduce building energy consumption,
while at the same time serving as an armature for biodiversity and localized,
low impact leisure activities such as wine-making and gardening.The
system is composed of cable nets, a series of components which populate the
nets, and landscape elements. Potential system configurations can be explored
using a data driven design protocol that uses a dynamic four dimensional
digital data map to determine which component distributions are appropriate for
particular zones of the district. Aggregated using Grasshopper and Rhinoceros,
the data map was constructed using site-collected information, public land use
databases, photogrammetry, and simulation tools, including radiation mapping
and computational fluid dynamics. The protocol itself is
a multistep iterative digital process. First, the data map is examined and
areas amenable to intervention are determined. Then surfaces are deployed in
relation to existing building structure and transformed into cable nets, which
are then relaxed inside the data model using Grasshopper and Kangaroo. The
relaxed net is then analyzed in relation to the data map, and a probability
matrix is used in conjunction with human design sensibility to determine
appropriate secondary component distributions. As this process is stochastic,
there are multiple possible deployment strategies for any given three
dimensional surface moving through the map. Thus the protocol identifies, for
example, areas where wind power devices are likely to be productive, but plants
on trellis elements might have difficulty establishing themselves. Potential
cable net and component configurations are then analyzed using Sustain
(prototype energy simulation software developed at Cornell University), which
provides feedback on the impact of the cable nets and the systems they host on
both the buildings and the surrounding environment. This process can be repeated
and tuned until a configuration is found that meets both quantitative and
qualitative performance criteria.
The
physical elements of the system are lightweight and loosely bound together. The
component systems are not integral parts of the cable net; rather they are
designed as an overlay that can be reconfigured over time. Therefore the system
is adaptive in the design phase, when potential configurations can be tested
and explored, and adaptive in the use phase, when existing pieces can be redeployed
as conditions on the ground change and new situations demand a material
response.