When artificial structures mimic the contours of topographic maps, which are almost sculptural in their own right, they become an extension of the land itself. The lines on the map that indicate changes in elevation, following the curves of dips and projections, easily transform into flat abstracted planes delineating the floors of a building or the levels of a stepped landscape design. Some of these built environments follow the existing shapes of the land beneath them and others create new ones altogether, reimagining the geography of the setting.

This concept model for an art gallery on UC Berkeley’s campus doubles as a bridge spanning Strawberry Creek. The design engages with the topography of the site allowing visitors to either cross or easily access the creek.#conceptmodel #architecture #ucberkeley #strawberrycreek pic.twitter.com/h1KqblfJap

— Jacoby Architects (@JacobyArch) November 17, 2017

Architects often start with 3D visual models of the terrain of a building site, which may be abstracted into layers of flat wood or foam. These artificial landscapes make it easier to envision how the new structure will fit into its surroundings, and it’s easy to see how they could have an influence on the design of the buildings themselves.

Some topographical architecture is made to blend in, presenting itself almost as if it grew naturally out of the hills that surround it. Krakow University student Adrian Kasperski designed a new natural park venue for the Island of Fogo after its previous one was destroyed by molten lava just a year after its opening, and he used the topography of the land as a guide to avoid similar catastrophes in the future and help camouflage the low-rise facility. It presents itself as a “slight cut in the caldera” with elongated plaza frames that dip down to follow the slopes.

In the Guangxi province of China, the new Suiseki Hall by Zhanghua Architects is as fluid as the body of water beside it, suggesting the shape of hills, yet there are no hills nearby. The architects actually wanted to represent a balance between the flat land and the craggy mountains, taking inspiration from the pattern of stone as it erodes beneath fast-flowing water.

Zaha Hadid Architects’ predilection for flowing organic shapes and parametric modeling naturally lends itself to topographical compositions, like the Beko Masterplan in Belgrade. Paying tribute to the region’s modernist traditions, this proposal embeds a new community into the surrounding mountains. Intriguingly, the flowing volumes seem to have been plucked and stretched right out of the more conventional building beside them, each of their floors like a rocky stratification.

In other cases, dramatic peaks project out of the ground like shards of stone, conjuring a mountain-like sense of solidity. Graphic structures like the Festival Hall in Era by Delugan Meissl Associated Architects take the shapes of natural landscape features and turn them into oversized inhabitable sculptures. The Festival Hall “developed from the topographical conditions, placing it in an adequate relationship with the existing Passionsspielhaus,” the architects explain. It works to achieve a harmony between itself and the existing historical building beside it as well as the mountains in the distance.

Projects like BC Prestige by 4M Architecture aim to create mountains where there are none, yet their silhouettes aren’t exactly natural, almost seeming like someone took a topographic map and sliced out some of the higher elevations, plopping them down elsewhere. Similarly, the Topographic House by MiAS Arquitectes is like an artificial crag overlooking the sea.

“Rising Over the Traces of History,” a design for a new governmental historic and cultural complex in Kaliningrad by ONZ Architects and Ercan Coban Architects, literally turns this concept upside-down. Its building is flat on top and along the sides, but its underbelly is curved to complement the hills and valleys of the land underneath it.

Named for the dramatic Dolomite mountain range in which it’s set, the Dolomitenblick holiday apartment building abstracts the steep slopes, making each shift in elevation into its own level. A diagonal cut offering entrance to the building slices its facade in half, almost as if the “rock” of the structure has been shaped by falling water. “Besides its functional meaning, this incision becomes the main defining element of the building” from the cut at either side a strip unfolds that forms the balustrade of a generous covered balcony and ends into the surrounding topography. Following the steep natural hillside with each floor the strips and the facade jump back,” says Plasma Studio.

Plasma is well known for “drawing landscapes into buildings,” taking natural shapes and stretching them into more geometric-looking volumes that remain organic nonetheless. This tendency is especially pronounced in projects like its Ggantija World Heritage Park proposal, the dynamic Esker Haus with its slatted timber facade mimicking a “stratified geological formation,” the similar Strata Hotel in Italy “developed as a free-flowing topography” and the Flowing Gardens project developed for the Beijing Olympics, which almost seems to recreate the look of a topographic map when viewed from above. Plasma notes that one of its main strategies is to seamlessly integrate architecture, landscape and urbanism.

Of course, it’s only natural that topographical design trickles down to landscape architecture as well. Designed with stormwater management in mind, the San Martín de la Mar Square in Cantabria, Spain by the appropriately named Zigzag Arquitectura looks like a topographic map come to life with its series of terraced platforms. The square integrates permeable paving and strips of grass to navigate a steep change in slope and make the overlook at the top more accessible to all.

Kengo Kuma’s Naturescape, a topographical landscape of stone and water created for the Urban Stories exhibition of contemporary living in Milan, interprets traditional Zen gardens in a delightfully graphic way. The layers of stone follow curves around the room, creating pathways, clusters of bamboo and pools of water.
http://www.zigzagarquitectura.com/

When fine art and architecture intersect, especially in our modern era of parametric modeling and 3D printing, the results can be strikingly different from the structures that surround them, in some instances seeming like sculptures were given growth serum and expanded to mind-boggling proportions. Eschewing the ordinary, these buildings feel like a chance for architects to flex their creativity and bring some interesting colors and proportions to their settings.

Melbourne Theater Company

Abstract shapes glow against a solid black mass on the exterior of this striking complex by Ashton Raggat McDougall, making the Melbourne Recital Centre and MTC Theater some of the most visually unique buildings in the city. The black and white color palette is accented by a vibrant red, with the geometric pattern continuing into the interior, looking three-dimensional when viewed from certain angles.

Tschuggen Grand Hotel

Rising from the Swiss mountainside like shards of ice, architect Mario Botta’s Berg Oase is a sculptural extension of the Tschuggen Grand Hotel. Serving as a wellness center and spa, the arrangement of towering glass wedges bring light streaming into the interior spaces and almost seem like natural structures themselves among the trees and rocks when viewed from afar.

Cloud House

A house shaped like a cloud? Why not? It may look like the occupants would be severely lacking in privacy, considering the two glazed facades, but this building by Australian firm McBride Charles Ryan is actually an extension to a more conventional street-facing home, and is shielded from neighbors’ views by the curved cloud-mimicking sides.

Suzhou Science & Cultural Arts Centre Facade

One way to give a building a dramatic makeover (or just ensure that it stand out from the very start) is to add a parametric facade, like the intricate screen covering the massive Suzhou Science and Cultural Arts Centre in China. Developed by Studio 505, the curving screen is shaped like a parabolic moon crescent and consists of a weatherproofing layer and an outer ornamental mesh screen that provides shading.

Palais Bulles

A classic example of sculptural housing with an aesthetic that’s so outside the norm, it’s almost alien, is Palais Bulles (“Palace of Bubbles.”) Created by architect Antti Lovag in 1989, the curvilinear house is set into a rocky hillside overlooking the Mediterranean Sea in Cannes, France. It’s often used for film festival parties and fashion editorials.

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Architecture As Art 13 Unusually Sculptural Buildings

At one restaurant in Berlin, you might spend more time gazing up in wonder at an undulating ceiling installation made from over 14,000 chopsticks than you do at your dining companion. Ceilings are often an afterthought, but these 14 (more) modern ceiling designs and installations completely transform the feel of each space, making restaurants, retail shops and even churches feel more like art installations than conventional interiors.

Futuristic Chapel Interior

Feeling a bit like it’s located on a spaceship, the Pastoral Care Center in Linz, Austrlia by X Architekten features a graphic geometric arrangement of striped white panels that make the spatial limitations difficult to discern. All inside surfaces are white and furniture is minimal to create a meditative atmosphere.

Aluminum Fins at Delft Railway Station

Pass through the fused glass envelope of the new Delft train station by Mecanoo and you’ll find yourself gazing up at curving arrangement of aluminum fins lining the vaulted ceiling. When viewed from certain angles, an abstracted 1877 map of the region appears

Clouds of Cubes

“Similar to fractal geometries,the ceiling installation in its layered layout is self-similar and recursive in the sense that its formal behavior is the same from near and from afar, and further exists within the fractal non-differentiability if one considers the essential multiplication of each member as its distance from the viewer increases,” says design firm BlueArch of its installatiion in a New York restaurant. They also integrated an LED light system into the poplar-cloud structure.

Explosion of Reclaimed Wood

Australia firm March Studio hung 2,000 pieces of reclaimed wood from the walls and ceiling of the Nishi Building in Canberra, creating cascading installation that almost seems to capture a structure mid-explosion. The boards were all recycled from demolished homes, a basketball court and the construction site of the Nishi itself.

One-of-a-Kind Starbucks in Japan

Adjacent to a Shinto shrine in Fukoko Prefecture, this Starbucks might be the most unique chain restaurant interior in the world. Architects Kengo Kuma and Associates created a thatched arrangement of over 2,000 wooden beams to give the cafe a nest-like feel. The installation takes inspiration from the limbs of trees and ceremonial lumber structures at the shrine.

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Do Look Up 14 Dazzling Modern Ceiling Designs

Mathematics are more integral to architecture than ever before, and as the methods of designing structures grow more complex, so do the calculations. As these fractal and parametric designs – both built and fantasy – prove, the only limit to architecture based on mathematical algorithms are those of physics and materials, and with the advent of 3D printing and other advanced construction techniques, the world of amazingly complex architecture just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

Parametric Party House

Built for Copenhagen Distortion, a summer festival that draws thousands into the city’s streets and clubs for all-night dance parties, this mobile parametric pavilion aims to “give architectural expression to this Dionysian experience.” Designed and built by experimental technology and acoustics programs from three universities, the pavilion rotates and moves like a piece of fabric despite the fact that it’s made up of 151 hinged plywood triangles finished in a reflective copper.

Intricate Fractal Fantasy Architecture by Tom Beddard

Tom Beddard’s fantasy architecture is far from realistic; instead, it’s an exploration of just how complex structures derived from algorithms can get and still be recognizable as potential human habitations and cities. Beddard makes some of the scrips he uses to create his works available on his website. Says the artist, “For me the creative process is writing my own software and scripts to explore the resulting output in an interactive manner. The best outcomes are often the least expected!”

L-Systems by Michael Hansmeyer

“For centuries architects have been inspired by nature’s forms and geometries,” says Michael Hansmeyer, a designer who produced the world’s first 3D-printed room as well as some amazingly complex fractal columns. “It is only in the past decade that much of the underlying logic, mathematics and chemistry of nature’s forms has been better understood. In the late 1960’s, the biologist Aristid Lindenmayer proposed a string-rewriting algorithm that can model simplified plants and their growth processes with an astounding ease. This theory is now known as L-Systems. This project examines whether this algorithm can open up possibilities in the field of architecture.” See more L-Systems in architecture at Hansmeyer’s website.

SOM Mumbai Airport Canopy

A fractal roof canopy tops off a terminal at Mumbai’s Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport, modernizing a complex that accommodates 40 million travelers every year. The design visually references the form of vernacular Indian pavilions with thirty mushrooming columns. The kaleidoscopic canopy extends across the arrivals roadway and is embedded with small disks of colorful glass to catch the light.

Fractal-Based Sky Habitat for Singapore

This fractal design by Moshe Safdie makes the absolute most of a small land footprint with a high-density 38-story sky habitat integrating stepped balconies that democratize views and private outdoor space. Envisioned for Singapore, the tower is porous to light and air to maximize air movement in the tropical climate, and features a series of sky bridges containing parks and swimming pools.

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Algorithmic Architecture 14 Fractalparametric Structures