İlkyaz Sarımehmetoğlu
2022 Spring
BS724 Nature Informed Computational Design in Architecture
Mimosa pudica (from Latin: pudica “shy, bashful or shrinking”) is known as the sensitive plant, touch-me-not which is a flowering plant. It includes various qualities in terms of its form and correspondence in addition to the well-known movement of folding.
“In a healthy Mimosa plant, you can observe two “rapid movement” responses to touch. With a light touch brushed along the leaves (called pinnules), the leaves fold together at points (pulvinules) along the rib (rachis). With a strong touch, the leaves will fold and the branch will drop along the point (pulvinus) where the main branch (petiole) joins the stem.”
As depicted within the description above, mimosa pudica establishes three different folding movements within its construction and completes these different actions simultaneously. Starting with the basic interrogation of the response to tactile stimuli with its leaf, Mimosa pudica is capable of achieving much more than that. The plant itself can respond to light, touch, and temperature changes respectively also. It assures diverse levels within its formation allowing simultaneous but diverse foldings within different levels.
In that sense, there were two types of actions and vectoral correspondences that were learned and derived from Mimosa pudica at the end. To start with, the simultaneous folding it is capable of doing is understood and learned with its capabilities of establishing the movement within different levels. Having defined the problem, as a multileveled performative pavilion that allows projection surfaces, and diverse levels that can hold people corresponding to different scales, mimosa pudica allows to establish many diverse possibilities by nature. To reference such a problem with the formation of Mimosa pudica, the overall completion of the performance pavilion turned out to be lightweight by nature, transparent and generative. Learning from the sensitive plant, an exoskeleton is generated with reference to the plant’s dimensions and vector movements allowing the movement on a larger scale.
Touch-me-not, as a project defining the interrelation between Mimosa pudica and the needs of the multi-leveled projective performance pavilion, creates also a linguistic contradiction while establishing the overall scheme to engage with personal manual interaction at most.