vierziglichter was a temporary light sculpture for the 8bar café on the campus of the msa|münster school of architecture.
The design depends on 40 cone like shapes that fill the complete ceiling of the room. All in all 1640 unique transparent lasercutted polypropylen parts form the hanging sculpture.
Each cone is lit up by an individual controllable LED. With the self-made Interface “Lucifer” the lights of the sculpture were able to react to sound, display images or animations and just light the room with a single color.
The sculpture improved not only the lighting condition but also the acoustics of the room. This resulted in an increasing usage by the students. Not only for coffee drinking but also for campus-parties.The opening and installation was during the yearly exhibition “annual12″ of the msa|münster school of architecture.
The form and panelling of the ceiling was developed using Grasshopper and McNeel’s Rhinoceros. So the design could be fitted dynamically in the target room for the sculpture. The final design was than optimized with the Galapagos Evolutionary Solver to have the optimum minimal bending in the single parts.
With additional work in RhinoScript the single parts were unrolled, tagged, nested to fit on the polypropylene sheets and exported as cutting plans for the lasercutter.
Through this process the difference between the digital model and the actual build sculpture is barely noticeable.