my design work in and out of architecture school.luis@legildesign.com

Woven Bookshelf
Reflect
Five Manhattan West
Equator Tower
The Way of the Dinosaurs
The Ghost in the Machine
Frida's Giraffes
McDonald's
Yongsan Tower
Woven Bookshelf
Woven Bookshelf

This bookshelf idea drew from the structure envisioned for the proposed Reflect sculpture. The structure consists of half-inch plywood strips that are woven into a hexagonal grid pattern and tied together in compression via three stiff shelfs and two concrete feet.   The finished bookshelf with concrete feet.     The first finished side.   […]

Reflect
Reflect

“Reflect” was my proposal for a public art competition on a piece of land on Brattle Street near Harvard Square. The proposal uses common building techniques and materials to erect a monument intended to provide a space for individual contemplation on the state of our housing stock in the United States. The brief project narrative […]

Five Manhattan West
Five Manhattan West

Five Manhattan West is a repositioning, re-cladding, and interior renovation of a 1,500,000 sf Manhattan Brutalist landmark directly adjacent to the Hudson Yards and Manhattan West developments. I was a member of the small design and development team for this project at REX Architecture. I worked on various aspects of the design throughout the conceptual design, schematic […]

Equator Tower
Equator Tower

Equator Tower is a 380 meter tall, 173,000 square meter tower proposal acting as an anchoring project in a proposed redevelopment area. The submission was one of five winning proposals in a limited competition in 2012. Equipped with a retractable sun shade, the project efficiency is aimed to be maximized in all regards while providing […]

The Way of the Dinosaurs
The Way of the Dinosaurs

    I created this piece entirely in Processing with minimal post production. The algorithm processes a specified set of characters in a number of specified fonts to extract the perceived “brightness” of a character on a blank background. This information is then used to plug the best matching characters into a matrix of sample […]

The Ghost in the Machine
The Ghost in the Machine

I more stumbled up this than created it outright as I was experimenting with some basic image manipulations in Processing. The actual script is very simple, but the results are quite fascinating if a bit eerie. The algorithm takes an image and subdivides it into a matrix of square samples and draws a diagonal that […]

Frida’s Giraffes
Frida's Giraffes

I am a big fan of Frida Kahlo, especially her “Two Frida’s” painting. If you know the work then the connection to this drawing is pretty clear. I made this piece with my trusty Pilot V5 and art markers.

McDonald’s
McDonald's

As the image implies, I can’t really say much about the project. I did, however, spend a very sizable amount of hours on the project and am proud of the work so I figured it is worth mentioning. You can find a bit more information about it on REX’s website by following the link below. […]

Yongsan Tower
Yongsan Tower

“YIBD ‘Project R6’ is an urban boutique residence for short-term business people, young urban professionals, and foreign residents. Due to the transience of its target users and the short durations during which they are home, R6’s unit sizes are small, including 40 m², 50 m², and 60 m² residences, with the majority being 40 m². […]

Extruded Hex Pic
Extruded Hex Pic

This Grasshopper definition is a continuation of some image tessellation experiments I have been doing in Processing extruded to 3 dimensions. The definition abstracts an image into hexagonal clusters made composed of 3 quadrilateral whose common point is then extruded to a height relative to the image brightness at that point. A mouthful, I know, […]

Trianglephant
Trianglephant

This triangular tessellation is an abstraction of an image and is generated through a script I wrote using the Processing programming language. I wrote the script to interpret an input image and give a resultant triangular tessellation with larger triangles representing brighter areas of the image and vice versa. After initial investigations/experiments I am very […]

TIMEless
TIMEless

  This sculpture was a piece commissioned by the Superfront Gallery in Los Angeles for their exhibition, “TIMEless,” an exhibition exploring the 4d possibilities of space. I worked with Michael Fox of FoxLin to develop a sculpture based on a short story which Michael wrote titled “Nano City” (read it here). The story is of […]

ENV Downtown
ENV Downtown

ENV Downtown was my Senior Degree Project at Cal Poly Pomona. The proposal is for a new facility for the College of Environmental Design of Cal Poly Pomona in downtown Pomona. As a concept, the idea of a College of Environmental Design is a unique one. The model at Cal Poly Pomona is unique in […]

More Sketching
More Sketching

I’ve had a lot of down time lately. Here are some more sketches!

unEARTH
unEARTH

The task at hand for this studio was to design an economically viable space station. Initially, the station was to be programmed as a space hotel, but to make the station economically viable each student was to propose another use for the project that could feasibly create revenue. This was one of the most interesting/frustrating […]

Mariehoj Culture Center
Mariehoj Culture Center

The future Mairehoj culture center draws a clear profile in the landscape. With a new foyer, the culture center will get a new face that invites in all the people of Ruderdahl’s municipality and a heart that can bring together the many users and activities in the house. The culture center merges together with the […]

Urban Continuance
Urban Continuance

Urban Continuance is the new urban typology. In dense urban areas, large, open park spaces are under utilized and inefficient. Sprawling expanses of grass are both unsustainable and unrepresentative of the needs of an urban population. Instead of the isolated grass lawn, then, a new park typology is needed: the park as connective tissue. The […]

Notodden Books and Blues House
Notodden Books and Blues House

Notodden has decided to join several cultural functions such as a cafe, a museum, and a library under one roof. This project programming allows for the possibility of creating a building where people of different ages and interests can meet and interact. As a tribut to the history of the iste, the roof of the […]

Facade-O-Matic!
Facade-O-Matic!

Catchy name, yeah? This is an idea I’ve kind of had kicking around in my head for a while. It is based on the Random Tessellation script I wrote for Processing a while back. This Grasshopper does much the same thing but in three dimensions instead of two. A unit module is created by the […]

A Walking City
A Walking City

A Walking City is a project on which I was design team member while I was employed at WE Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark. The proposal was our entry in an international competition to reinvent the city of Drammen, Norway. The approach we took on this project was that of reinvigorating the historic city center of Drammen […]

Rhombic Disphenoid
Rhombic Disphenoid

This Grasshopper definition approximates a disphenoid minimal surface in Rhino. The definition creates one and also has the option to create a grid of such geometries as seen above. The definition employs the Minimal Surface plugin for Grasshopper by Robert Cervellione. This object is used to speed up the process of defining the composite surface […]

Darboux Curve Evolution
Darboux Curve Evolution

Darboux evolution is a pretty cool way to morph a curve. Basically, you take a polycurve and find the midpoint of each segment composing that closed polycurve. Create a new polycurve by connecting these midpoints and repeat. It is a simple procedure with pretty nice results. The more iterations, the more the curve begins to […]

Recursion RhinoScript
Recursion RhinoScript

This is a simple recursion script with pretty nice results. The idea comes from Marc Fornes’ experiments with the same technique. This script creates a recursive equilateral triangle sequence. As an input the script asks for an edge length, incident angle, and the number of iterations.   Download the Script   Recursion by Luis Gil […]

Curve Branching
Curve Branching

A simple L-systems branching script for Rhino. Run the script, select a starting curve and the script will replicate that curve in a branching manner. Download Script   Curve Branching by Luis Gil is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.  

Grasshopper Basics
Grasshopper Basics

I put together these files a while back for a Grasshopper workshop I gave while I was working at WE Architecture in Copenhagen. While these files are not so much tutorials, they present the very basic knowledge that is necessary to be able to really get off the ground when using Grasshopper. There are three […]

Living Market
Living Market

Located very close to the busiest metro station in Denmark, Israel Plads can be seen asa central location various regions of København such as Nørrebro and the historical citycenter. This location makes for a natural gathering space for the inhabitants of the city andgreat social attractor, especially given its close proximity to Nørreport station. Until […]

Happy 2011
Happy 2011

Yaay! It’s almost 2011! I’m posting this and I’m realizing that I haven’t updated this website in quite a while! My post of the 2010 poster is only a few posts back and that was a year ago! My 2011 resolution? Update the site more frequently. There are a lot of projects missing on this […]

Hexagonal Weaving in Grasshopper
Hexagonal Weaving in Grasshopper

This Grasshopper definition was inspired by the structure for the new Pompidou-Metz Center by Shigeru Ban. The structure is said to be inspired by hexagonal weaving pattern found in traditional Chinese hats. This is a very common weaving pattern also found in things such as chairs. For a large scale structure, however, it is impractical […]

Weaving in Grasshopper
Weaving in Grasshopper

This is an update to the weaving Rhinoscript I posted a while back. I decided to play with it and try it out in Grasshopper a while back when I was learning Grasshopper. This is the result and it works a lot better and smoother than the RhinoScript version ever did. Feel free to download […]

Nansensgade Furniture Showroom
Nansensgade Furniture Showroom

A semi-automated furniture showroom/boutique in Copenhagen.

Studenterhuset Design Competition
Studenterhuset Design Competition

A dynamic, covered outdoor space in a tiny courtyard in Copenhagen.

Processing Mosaic
Processing Mosaic

Photo mosaics in Processing.

Parametric Stairs in Grasshopper
Parametric Stairs in Grasshopper

A useful tool to dynamically create and edit staircases via Grasshopper.

Portraits of Friends
Portraits of Friends

I made these a little while back as birthday presents for some friends. One really likes rainbows and one is my favorite sci-fi nerd. It was good to sit down and draw again for the first time in a long time.

Sankt Jørgens Sø Bath House
Sankt Jørgens Sø Bath House

A bath house proposal on Sankt Jørgens Sø in København.

Danish Co-Housing
Danish Co-Housing

A Danish cohousing proposal. My first design project in Copenhagen.