Seaside Second Home Part 2 Project 2012 Joakim Hoen Oslo School of Architecture and Design Oslo | Norway ‘Seaside Second Home’ aims to create a model for digitally conceived and fabricated houses and highlight how contextual parameters can be the main drivers of design. What is important is the process, or processes, which lead to the final architectural design.Greg Lynn argued in 1999 that we should be designing in an animate environment, where form is a result of ambient forces over time. In order to do this efficiently we need to employ computational strategies for simulation of these environments as well as means of analyzing and altering form according to these.The project is an attempt to integrate contextual data (weather and topography) as well as human dimensions in the digital conception of a series of second homes. These are designed to be specific responses to instances of a particular type of site which can be found everywhere along the Norwegian coastline, characterized by bare rocks, marine climate and spectacular views.Instead of designing a single discrete cabin, the project tries to establish data structures, describing the relationship between the various needs of the inhabitants and the extrinsic data that articulates the layers of the building envelope. To demonstrate this, three sites were chosen as examples.The project required the development of a series of custom software tools.The first set of these interface with Meteorologisk Institutt and Statens Kartverk in order to effectively gather and prepare weather and LIDAR-data for use in the design process. The other looks at the use of this data as input in a generative process leading to a similar but different design for every site of the same type.Simultaneously a spatial idea were developed, based on a continuous space where vertical communication is the space and that this space is divided by inclining the floor and ceiling surfaces to block off or provide visual contact between functions as one moves through the building. This challenges not only the way we look at ‘the floor’ but also the cellular room arrangement that according to Robin Evans (“Figures, Doors and Passages”) has been predominant in our dwellings for the last 500 years. Tutor(s)