Study 5 – New Castle County Library

Architecture by Perkins&Will

Script and methodology:

Parameter Setup: Using number sliders, the following are defined:

• Minimum and maximum perforation diameters
• Number of points to create color mesh

Design Challenges: To Voronoi, or not to Voronoi…
Through multiple iterations of the script, Voronoi divisions fell short of the uniquely organic original. Ultimately, locally drawn boundaries were used instead, using the facade as reference. In the future, landmarks unique to the site could serve as geometries of interest.

Placement of perforations: With the region boundaries drawn, and scaled down by 5%, points for perforations were established using a triangulated mesh. The vertices of the mesh were then filtered to not include points lying on the curve boundary to preserve proper spacing.

Reference meshes: Before running a circle packing solver, reference color meshes were needed for the circle diameters. These references were made from four representative color saturations to get a homogenous mixture of variably sized circles. The greater the density of points, the greater the color contrast and circle size variation.

Circle packing: Different circle diameters were tested to ensure correct proportions, and the drawn circles were then packed within the curve boundaries.

Changing circles to rotated ellipses: Lastly, to match the original, the circles were randomly and variably scaled along one axis and rotated, resulting in a much more organic distribution.

Results: