# Trabeculae/Protosynthesis by Supermanoeuvre

Trabeculae is a project imagined by Supermanoeuvre, a young "practice" created by Dave Pigram (New York) and Iain Maxwell (London). What they define as projects, research and teaching (AA, Pratt and Michigan mostly) are more or less intermingling for a global creative attitude trying to generate architectures related to variable "social, cultural and ecological" parametrics.

In fact, Trabeculae is a project for last Beijing's Biennal extending a previous research called Protosynthesis which was first released for Marc Fornes' Philadelphia exhibition: Scriptedbypurpose.

Trabeculae is the result of reimagining the central atrium office tower. Replacing the traditionnal operation of repetitive extrusion, a heliotropic branching system actively seeks out those areas within the zoning envelope with greatest access to daylight. Forking and swelling in response to varing light conditions, the atrium is thus conceived as a site-specific network that traverses intellintelligently and freely from one facade to another. The atrium becomes the defining element of differentiation within otherwise normative floorplates while maintaining efficient floorscape ratios.
Within the atrium, a second order proliferation of the same system at a finer scale develops a structural meshwork - the trabeculae. The swellings and coagulationsof this topologically free structural network-within-a-network accomodate meeting & function rommes, bridges, and communication strairs as welll as supportng the attriums glazing.
An instantiation of the proto-synthesis algorithm this project embraces the specific heterogeneity of a given scenario and points towards the possibility of architecture speciation.

Project team: Dave Pigra, Iain Maxwell, Brad Rothenberg, Ezio Blasetti