SPATIOTEMPORAL FORMS: KINETIC ARCH

Spring 2021

This two-part project uses the movement of the human body through time and space to form an architecture. Specifically, the motion of a golf swing inspired the form and program for a city bridge prosthetic.

The first part of the project aims to capture the motion in a series of drawings and mapping. I first extracted 16 frames of a video of a golf swing, then analyzed and tracked the relationships between certain nodal points on the body and the golf club. This 2-dimensional mapping became the basis for an abstracted, axonometric representation of the golf swing.

The second part of the project uses the forms and geometries discovered in the previous drawings and applies them to the site of a city bridge and park. The program for this project is a kinetic archway that goes over a running path. A series of rods swing outward serially, transmitting energy and motion from one side of the path to the other. The form and structure use principles found in the analyses in Part I. The overall shape of the arch is informed by the shape of a golf swing extruded across time. The structural components and the arcs created by the movement of each rod come from the relationships found between different joints of the body. The  end result is an arch that expresses the human body as it swings a golf club over space and time.

Click and scroll through the next three galleries to see all drawings and models for this project.