This is Memory Loop, a computational design project that reimagines the rehabilitation experience for prisoners on Alcatraz Island. Here, architecture becomes more than confinement. It becomes an adaptive, generative space for introspection and reflection. A system that emerges, evolves, and dissolves in response to its purpose.
The concept is simple but powerful. Instead of static confinement, prisoners embark on a spatial journey. The Memory Loop allows them to leave the island momentarily. Not physically, but experientially. This loop journey follows a path of reflection and self awareness, driven by a generative system that transforms spatial logic into lived experience.
PSEUDOCODE
Extract the Island Boundary: Start with the perimeter curve of Alcatraz Island, which frames the spatial logic and anchors the design to the island’s edge, establishing a connection between the island and the loop.
Define Start and End Points: Identify two key points on the boundary—the departure and return points. Their position and spacing dictate the path’s length and curvature.
Generate the Path: Use easing functions to create a smooth, fluid trajectory between the start and end points. Parameters like ease-in and ease-out control the curvature’s acceleration and deceleration, avoiding rigidity.
Define Key Spatial Moments: Place key nodes along the path where volumetric “blobs” expand, deform, and merge. These blobs respond to curve bends, intensifying spatial moments through parametric control.
Integrate Light Tunnels: Add vertical apertures for natural light, positioned and sized based on the curvature. These create dynamic interior lighting with moments of shadow, glow, and reflection.
Generate Endoskeleton: Transform the interior by box morphing a geometry onto the mesh surface, creating the structure’s final form.
Generate Exterior Shell: Offset mesh and apply Perlin noise by using easing functions for Z values.
PATH GENERATION
Along the curve, key nodes are defined where spatial expansion occurs. These nodes are points where space grows into volumetric blobs. Using a parametric process, these blobs are expanded, deformed and merged with one another through boolean operations to create a continuous, unified space. Blobs are not arbitrary. Their size, spacing and connectivity are directly linked to the logic of the curve. As the curve bends, the system identifies moments where spatial intensity should increase.
Eight iterations of the memory loop generated with slight variations in input parameters. Changes to blob density, path curvature, and light tunnel placement are tested in parallel, giving us a comprehensive understanding of spatial outcomes. This iterative approach allows for a data driven selection process, ensuring that the final design is optimized for experience, material efficiency, and structural logic.
ALONG THE LOOP
To enhance the interior atmosphere, we introduce light tunnels. These vertical apertures puncture the structure from above, allowing natural light to enter. The position, size and intensity of these light tunnels are driven by the curvature logic of the path itself. This dynamic control of light transforms the interior experience, creating moments of shadow, glow and reflection.
The interior surface of the endoskeleton is transformed by box morphing a simple geometry onto the mesh surface. We thereby create a woven appearance throughout the whole of the structure.
While the interior space is soft and smooth, the exterior shell has a more translucent reflective finish, which is manipulated with Perlin noise.
By harnessing computational logic, we have created a system that adapts, evolves, and optimizes itself in real time. The memory loop is not just a structure, it is a process. A process that generates a space for reflection, transformation, and ultimately, return.
