The Vortex

My thesis project in school was an expansion for the Philadelphia International Airport. This was around the time they announced they would be adding another terminal, so it seemed a good opportunity to try something crazy. The design concept centered around vortices. The energy expended at the tips of the wings of aircraft in flight can be powerful movers, which seemed an appropriate analogy for the design of an airport.
To build the model, I simulated a vortex in a physics modelling video game design program. I bent the field around a linear pathway, and exported particle locations from various time frames in the animation. The particle locations were then loaded into a separate program which could track a particle and build geometry based on their pathways. So in the model, you literally see the simulated pathway played out as steel ribbons.
Once the ribbons were placed, I wrote a series of scripts that modify the ribbons to respond to the interior use of various areas. They would angle where I didn't want windows, open where I wanted doors, etc.