FLUVIAL STUDIES
FLUVIAL STUDIES
Cornell University, AAP
Design and Making I, Fall 2024
— DESIGN 6151
MY ROLE
Designer, Prototyper, Fabricator, Researcher
DESCRIPTION
Material studies on the branching veins of a leaf, asking how the same geometry might build structures that draw water, nutrients, or even information from their surroundings.ORIGIN
The starting point was a single leaf of the prayer plant, Maranta leuconeura, whose veins split and split again into a network that both carries resources and holds the leaf’s shape. Looking closer, under a microscope, revealed the same logic at the cellular scale, in matrices packed with cytoplasm and chloroplasts. Moving between those scales raised the question that organized the rest of the work: if a leaf can move water and nutrients this efficiently through branching channels, what else could the geometry move, and what could be built with it?
PROCESS
Observation came first: tracing how one channel becomes many, and recording, under magnification, how faithfully the structure repeats and how light passes through the cells. Those drawings were then translated into rules an algorithm could follow, and the resulting patterns were mapped against natural flow lines to see where they agreed. Only after that did the studies become physical, through laser-cut and 3D-printed forms, layered sheets of diffuse acrylic, and ink drawn through paper by capillary action.
METHOD
The branching geometries and patterned fields were built in Rhino and Grasshopper and rendered in Blender. To test flow, strips of laser-cut paper with different incision patterns were stood in ink-dyed water and watched as the ink climbed. Young–Laplace diagrams gave the physics behind what the paper showed, relating surface tension, contact angle, and gravitational pressure. Simulation, experiment, and the equations each checked the other two.
NEXT STEPS
At larger scales the same principles point toward passive irrigation and resource distribution that needs no power, and, paired with adaptive materials, toward green walls and habitats shared between species. The open questions are structural: whether porous ceramics or passive-membrane polymers could carry these geometries at building scale and survive outdoors. If they can, the result would be infrastructure that behaves more like a plant than a pipe.