Diploma Unit Two. Architectural Association School of Architecture

Tools for Architecture is a research unit based at the Architectural Association in London formed by a team of MArch AA Diploma students and lead by Space Popular directors Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg.

Artificial Landscape Generation

Many experiences of Overlapping Realities would require irregular walking surfaces.
For generating irregular surfaces like landscapes, I’m using a device called Stewart-Gough Platform, a type of parallel robot that
has six prismatic actuators, commonly hydraulic jacks or electric actuators, attached in pairs to three positions on the platform’s
baseplate, crossing over to three mounting points on a top plate. Devices placed on the top plate can be moved in the six degrees
of freedom in which it is possible for a freely-suspended body to move. These are the three linear movements x, y, z (lateral,
longitudinal and vertical), and the three rotations pitch, roll, & yaw.

Hexapod
In my design, I’m using an array of hexapods that are collectively forming a surface. A thick layer, probably made out of rubbery
material would cover the platforms creating a seamless walking surface. A corresponding virtual layer would then be applied in
a personal AR device. Although there are evident limitations to the types of surfaces that can be created (for example sharper
objects and vertically concave objects), there are still countless of possibilities for creating walking surfaces ranging from planetary
landscapes to abstract wonderlands of our imagination.