This project is done in collaboration with research at Cornell Architecture.
Zimmer aims to challenge architecture’s stasis, its passivity, its fixity, its desire to keep the rest of the world outside of itself.
What if we rethink architecture as active: as a series of elements that harness energy, that are physically dynamic, that are generative, that engage with nature, that leave a trace, that impact and are impacted by their context?
Zimmer is a `building’ with legs instead of columns, no walls, and a porous roof truss that is analogous to a multi-legged animal body. It should walk a few hundred meters over a few months, off the grid, using some mixture of solar, wind, water and human power. The plan is for a building frame that is 50’ x 25’ x 15’ tall using a light-gauge steel frame.
While Architecture has frequently made reference to architecture as a “machine” (Le Corbusier) and paper designs for mobile and dynamic projects like Archigram’s Walking Cities or Cedric Price’s Fun Palace have captured our imaginations, the interplay between mechanical systems and architecture has been limited. This project hopes to provoke, through real construction and operation, a new era of dynamic architecture.
Zimmer is a collaboration between Cornell Architecture (Caroline O'Donnell and Martin Miller) with Cornell's Biorobotics and Locomotion Lab in the Mechanical Engineering Department (Andy Ruina and Jason Cortell).
