House in Monsaraz
Original project: Aires Mateus
Programming Language: Julia
Algorithmic Design Tool: Khepri
Aires Mateus, a Portuguese architectural studio, frequently plays with subtracted volumes to achieve a brutalist and sculptural effect in their work. The subtraction of volumes is one of the fundamental operations of a geometric modeler, the others being the union and intersection of volumes. Together, they constitute the Boolean operations. A Boolean operation expresses a semantic relation between two shapes, which might be difficult to translate to the built reality, where matter is typically handled additively. Non orthogonal representations such as these require specific representation mechanisms that can express the concept. As an example of the applications of Boolean operations, we focused on the House in Monsaraz, a concrete house in the Portuguese Countryside. Two prominent features stand out in this project: a cantilevered roof jutting out towards the lake is the result of a subtracted ellipsoid to the main volume; and two circular light wells visible only from above, which resemble two subtracted cylinders. In order to test the expressive power of algorithmic descriptions regarding Constructive Solid Geometry (CSG), this parametric adaptation of the project was conceived using Boolean operations only, that is, subtracting all interior spaces and featured apertures to the main volume.
