Experiencing the Vortex: An Immersive Exploration of a Natural Phenomenon

This interdisciplinary design and research project, resulting from a two-year collaboration between a group led by an architect and an engineer/physicist, two PhD students, two Masters’ students, and one undergraduate student, presents a break away from designated disciplinary roles and embraces the premise of working on a truly inter and cross-disciplinary setting. In doing so, its primary motivation is to question theassigned roles one may take in a project, and work in common and through a lateral structure. Invested in making architecture an equal counterpart to science, our team worked with a research group focusing on Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI). While FSI problems have applications in many scales of daily life, from brain aneurysms to wind turbines, and the original motivation for the architecture team has been to work hand in hand with the scientists on issues of energy harvesting and climate justice, it became apparent that meaningful long-term collaboration needed to start at a foundational level. In other words, the necessity of building a common language, creating common goals, and developing common methods of work became the foundational blocks for this work, which has so far only developed work that is focusing on the fundamental science problem and understanding what architecture, as a discipline with highly specialized methods of representation and thinking can offer to enrich it.