Alve0sis Animat
Installation on shell structures
Urbanites +
Alve0sis: Animat is the first full-scale realization of the Alveosis research, an ongoing inquiry into tubular rhizome structures that Nilüfer Kozikoğlu initiated through balloon experiments in 2009 and that has been developed by successive teams at Urban Atölye since 2013. The installation was presented at the 4th International Architecture Biennial Antalya in September 2017, produced in collaboration with GRC manufacturer Fibrobeton, and is the subject of a patent published in 2021. The name Alveosis refers to the process and state of becoming hollow and tubular. Animat names the particular version realized for Antalya: a structure designed to host living matter within its hollowed interior, reconciling the built form with biological cycles.
The fabrication method is as much a part of the work as the form itself. Fabric molds, derived automatically from the digital model through a generative process based on Voronoi mesh partitioning, are suspended from a metal framework and stretched under their own weight. Concrete is then sprayed onto the fabric surface in layers, conforming to gravity as it builds up, until the shell achieves structural integrity and is released from the frame. The result is a continuous, hollow, tubular skin: a networked shell in which every element carries load and the whole is active. The hollowed interior was filled with a mixture of mycelium and sawdust. The installation was positioned in the shade of trees in Karaalioğlu Park in Antalya, its apertures oriented north; within approximately three weeks, mushrooms had emerged through the openings in the surface. The structure was watched rather than managed: the form creates the conditions, and the living matter responds.
What Alve0sis: Animat proposes is a shift in how the relationship between nature and structure is understood. The mold technology behind it carries a lower carbon footprint than conventional formwork. The hollowed geometry, high in strength relative to its weight, opens possibilities for infrastructure circulation within buildings, as well as canopy, pavilion and facade applications. But more fundamentally, the work asks what it means to design a structure that does not resist natural cycles but participates in them, where the filling is not inert but alive, and where the building process is not completed at installation but continues afterward. Alve0sis: Animat was included in the Arkitera Architecture Yearbook 2017 and was a shortlisted entry in the Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards 2018 in the Experimental category.
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In collaboration with
Fibrobeton
With thanks
Agroma
Ateknik Structural Design
Aysel Çakır
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