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Does anyone know how to create a geometry from 3d polylines or contours in 3dsMax or Autocad, or do the same with the massing tool in Revit?

Library Experiments

The Distributed Office

Here is the interim proposal, along with the synopsis ripped off from the flash file. Patience with the flash file it takes a while to load.

Planning

To design a still tower for a society of mobile knowledge workers is redundant. A static, mono-located office space designed for said workers to perform his/her task is defunct considering the anywhere/anytime and ‘anyplace’ potentials that wireless mobility affords.

Is a new highrise office development required? A run by Yahoo! Pipes against market sources such as realcommercial.com.au and commercialrealestate.com.au reveals exact locations and rentable areas in Parramatta. Add those disparate envelopes up and you will find more vacant spaces than those designed for the Parramatta Masterplan. 

In terms of the working environment, no new forms, materials, etc are required, simply upgrades and infrastructure additions. In this case, what are the still forms of space that is required in this new workspace system? Data Farms, Processor Farms, Central Receptionist Areas, Lockers, in short: remote infrastructure. 

Field

Now that there is no top-down architectural hierarchy and order where there is bottom-up micro-coordination, how do you determine a space-syntax to the scheme? 

Geographic features are fed into Yahoo Pipes and measured against end user ratings from bottom up sources such as Truelocal.com. A restaurant located along a nicely designed avenue that is close to public transport scores lightly compared to the strip of restaurants further north of Church Street in which the locals dub “Little Paris”. Fields of influence i.e. likely scope of travel an average user would like to spend travelling to from his/her workplace are extrapolated and densified against the end user ratings. 

Routine

We have established that the relationship between the spaces and external features is one based on something similar to end user ratings and leeways, rather than top-down principles of order, form, scale etc. 

We could now reverse engineer these score to predict likely usages of the vacant building floors, and in turn optimise the organisation of said spaces. For example, a wanderer who is mindset on getting a cup of coffee before work will “given the opportunity” likely end up in a space close to the coffee shop if there is no preconception on where he/she is going to work at. Similarly, A client coming into town requesting a face-to-face meeting will likely be held in a office space close to his/her hotel and near parking facilities.

Remote

A plethora of infrastructure upgrades is likely to be expected to sustain The Distributed Office. To effectively cater for the wireless, anytime/anywhere knowledge work society we will need to implement rigorous plug and play capabilities in the new teleoffices, including integrated access (via swipe card, smartphones etc), hardware docking stations,  shared print facilities and teleconferencing.

Ironically, the only fixed, built function is that relating to the storage of vast data servers and processors located in the refurbished library. Here, traditional office services can integrate and operate in a more efficient manner. A librarian can adopt his/her expertise in indexing and archiving to store all hard-goods and information of multiple peoples and corporations. A centralised receptionist centre can operate like an IT support service, directing all incoming calls, emails, people etc to their respective locations. With this comes an invigorated role of the librarian and the receptionist; once considered as a low assistant based profession can now be redefined as an all-seeing archiver/indexer and a mover/shaker. Premium customers can opt for a concierge service where goods are brought directly to their place. However, the new consolidation entails drawbacks; longer working hours for library staff, and the library itself is expected to operate 24-hours.   

     

Generally, nothing significant needs to be done to the existing vacant lots; besides minor infrastructure upgrades as mentioned.

Hub

Replacing hard information with soft information in the context of a library entails interesting dualities. Books are now seen as technology that behaves in replication and redundancy, one collection stacked upon each other, one edition after another. Social Media and bottom-up information however has the characteristics of renewal and reassembly, updating on the click of the refresh button. While books are collections of many individual objects of single strings of information, digital and social media are its binary opposite; one collection – continually refreshed information.  The building lives in a refreshed state, responding to information, and also to infrastructural use (the coming and going of bikes, the fluctuations in network and computer usage, the amount of hard content stored and retrieved etc).