Green canopy

Made in collaboration with Ian Bennett, Caitlyn Steele and Xiaoyi Peng

We approached the design using skills we were currently learning and developing for the Bloom installation; Rhino and Grasshopper. Using grasshopper we used scripting to create the arching shell, and mapped a voronoi pattern onto the lofted shell. We scripted the voronoi pattern and arches into pipes and brought it into Rhino. From Rhino we cleaned up the mismatching pipe connections and split the shell in half to create openings on each end. This led to the renderings and visual aesthetics seen in the final design of our bus stop, a Green Canopy of recycled framing and a recycled plastic shell.

We had to find a material that would be able to not only support the structure but would be pliable enough to form organic curves. We discovered that many metal factories dispose of excess metal pipes and decided to use them as our main structure. An inner piping was added to the design to add extra support between each main structural member, this will also be built with metal pipes and the two will be soldered together. As for the mesh we want to use some type of a plastic membrane, but a waterproofed fabric has also been discussed. This installation will be connected to the ground using embedded anchor bolts.