ARCH 436

Box, Rectangular Grid, List Item (Grouping), Extrusion, Randomisation

Tsunami is one of the awful natural disasters that drive more than 300,000 people into a death. It mostly generated by earthquakes in deep ocean ground, meteor impact to the surface of sea, volcano eruption and landslides. World record of highest tsunami was 1720 ft which is about 300 feet higher than Empire State Building in New York. One question came up in my mind, ‘what about wave break? if the wave break cannot prevent that large wave and function well, what it is for?’. The problem of wave break was the height of the coverage. because they are laying randomly on the ground or the slope, it would not reach that high enough to prevent larger sea waves. This project is proposing a new type of wave break system combining wave-breaks and a skyscraper to maximise the height of protection. Skyscrapers    would be locating on the ocean side where tsunami and flooding often operated. They are working as a dam with rectangular grid facade and extruded randomly to reduce the water energy from the ocean. The extrusion of facade panels creates a parabola shape from bottom to the top and gradually straightens for the openings of building. To work on the project, grasshopper is very useful tool for the ‘randomness’. I started from the basic study of randomness in grasshopper by using different random components (Split windows, Voronoi facade: populate2D, 3D, Voronoi and random).