The Student Nest: parametric explorations of a Performance-Oriented design

We are now experiencing the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and in this scenario, multidisciplinarity is imperative. Themes such as sustainability can be solved in a variety of ways by making effective use of digital parametric tools for architectural conception. The present work is an extensive research that converges into an explorative project with real demands. In this research, relevant themes are addressed for a design that uses digital techniques to generate optimized forms, directed to a specific performance. The structural behavior was prioritized as a starting point, anchored in a biomimetic approach as well as in the structural theory of purely compressed structures. In this theme, Form Finding methods are discussed, both digital and pre-digital, as a process to generate optimized forms. Generating complexity is virtually a resource that has been available to architects since the 1990s, but the materialization of complex forms is challenging, and it is in this challenge that one finds the fascination before such forms. Digital manufacturing has narrowed the gap between virtuality and reality and, still in constant development, is revolutionizing the area of civil construction. In the second part of the work a project is developed, putting into practice the previous theory. The project, proposed for the context of the University of Brasilia, is a student housing in which the university is an experimental stage for new techniques of generation and execution of complex forms in architecture. In the project, parametric tools were used for the generation of all elements, structural or not, as well as for bioclimatic analysis and application of construction standards. Concluding the theory, the design has an experimental and probative character of the themes previously worked on in the theoretical part.