Shading for Building Facade with Two-Color One-Dimension Range-Two Cellular Automata on A Square Grid
Machi Zawidzki and Katsuhiro Nishinari
A practical application of cellular automata (CA) in the field of Architecture is presented, where one-dimensional CA on a square grid drives a modular shading system of a building facade. Examples of three classes: general, semi-totalistic and totalistic of two-color one dimension range-two automata are analyzed for potential practical use. The problem of desired change in the opacity of the shading array as a function of the sequence of initial conditions (SIC) is discussed. The ideal SICs for selected CAs on 12 × 12 cell arrays found by backtracking algorithm are presented. The influence of the type of boundary conditions (BC) is discussed and a special type of a fixed BC is introduced. The robustness of the system under two types of permanent failure is analyzed – the single cell failure, and deactivation of a single column of cells.
Keywords: Adaptive architecture; modular shading system; fixed boundary conditions; robustness; failure.