Looking through an old hard drive, I came across these great Polaroid photos of a 3D printed model of the Strata Tower that we made while I was at Asymptote Architecture.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
The Strata Tower was my final project at Asymptote Architecture. I remember one night in Dubai just before we started, Hani Rashid and I smoked cigars at a floating nightclub (so Dubai) and talked endlessly about our ideas and ambitions for the building.
I spent a sleepless year on the design, working solid through Christmas and New Years without taking a day off. Still, it all felt worthwhile when construction started.
Unfortunately, and this tends to happen too frequently in architecture, it did not get much further than this.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
Strata Tower » Aerial View
Strata Tower » Aerial Detail
Google Earth now has images of the Strata Tower in Abu Dhabi under construction.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
The surface contours tell the story in this aerial view. .
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
We’ve reverse engineered the geometry of our tower down to three formulas and a set of points in excel. The image above shows a Catia model Front generated from the data we emailed over.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
This diagram plots the geometric rules for the plan of the tower I'm designing. I'm working towards developing a set of formulas and data points for the tower as a whole so that the geometry can be plotted in various software suites.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture
David Farnsworth, the structural engineer we’re working with from Arup New York, won the gold prize at this weekend’s Smart Geometry conference by producing a parametric model of the tower I’m designing at Asymptote. Using Bentley’s Generative Components (beta) he was able to resolve the geometry of the tower’s unique structural system and enable the structure to redistribute itself based on changes to the buildings overall geometry.
This three pronged, torqued form is the beginning of our explorations for a tower we are designing for a massive development in Abu Dhabi.
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Asymptote Architecture: Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture