UOFT | Perforated facade
This project was created during my time as an intern at Diamond Schmitt Architects in Toronto. It involved the design of a full-area fall protection system in the atrium of the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at the University of Toronto. The Bahen Centre is primarily used by the Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering, the Faculty of Computer Science and the Faculty of Mathematics.
In the design process, a light bronze aluminum panel was chosen. The idea was to use laser cutting technology to remove pieces to provide a view into the atrium and creating a source of natural light. Out of several design proposals, a simple perforated facade was chosen. It has several perforated openings that vary in size and thus create an organic structure for the overall image. During the process the program Grasshopper was used and several scripts were created to quickly generate many iterations of the facade. The so-called Perlin Noise was used for the distribution of the size variants. This is a function that generates pseudo-random numbers which, compared to a normal random number generator, leads to very organic number sequences. Perlin Noise has many applications today. It has its origins in computer science and mathematics, thus perfectly befitting the use as a facade for the Bahen Centre.