Resonance Exchange
Sympathetic resonance made structural. A light rail canopy that turns toward the incoming train and expresses its energy through a twisting, directional form.
The design intent is rooted in the idea of music made visible, the notion that spatial sound and rhythm can be given form and held within architecture. Two intertwining Möbius strips make up the geometry, each a single continuous surface with no fixed inside or outside. The seamless quality of the form, and the way it lifts off a wrapping band of stepped seating, draws directly from Kazuyo Sejima, whose work treats structure as one continuous fluid surface rather than a stack of heavy parts.
The Grasshopper script starts by interpolating a curve through a series of points to set the looping path of each strip. That curve is divided into segments, and a perpendicular frame is placed at each division so a profile can sit square to the path. A polygon profile is then rotated progressively along the curve through a series of angles, which produces the half twist and lets each surface read as one uninterrupted Möbius band. The rotated profiles are lofted together into a continuous surface. Two strips were generated this way and intertwined at the centre of the form, where they meet to carry the roof as one unified component.
The patterned strip is applied through the surface's own UV coordinates. The surface is reparameterised to a clean 0 to 1 range, points are spread evenly across that range, and isocurves are drawn at each position, then trimmed and joined so the slit openings follow the twist of each strip. The stepped seating is generated directly into the surface through an amplitude and move sequence and offset to a set width, forming the amphitheatre steps that wrap the base.
The columns are built separately. A tapering radius is controlled by two graph mappers, circles are stacked up to a set tower height, and those circles are lofted and capped into a solid to form each column, with a spiralling curve arrayed around it to vary the profile as it rises. The assembly is mirrored for both column positions.