Emergent Reefs

The purpose of Emergent-Reefs is to establish, through computational design strategies and machine-based fabrication, seamless relationships between three different aspects of the architectural process: generation, simulation and construction, with the intent of exploiting the expressive and tectonic potential of D-Shape technology for underwater reef formations as a design response to coastal erosion. Starting from a digital simulation of a synthetic local ecosystem, a generative technique based on multi-agent systems and reaction-diffusion (through continuous cellular automata - CCA) is implemented in a voxel field at several scales. Discrete voxel space eases the simulation of complex systems and processes (including CFD simulations) via CCA algorithms, which then can be translated directly to the physical production system, which in case of addtive technology can be specified as guided growth.