Emergent Reefs are atoll-shaped formations to host an underwater sculpture gallery while at the same time providing the material and spatial preconditions for the development of marine biodiversity on the transformed sea-bed. These were developed as a thesis project at the University of Bologna by Alessandro Zomparelli (advisor Alessio Erioli, special thanks to Diego Angeli of Mimesis for consulting in the development of CFD analysis).
Starting from a digital simulation of a synthetic local ecosystem, a process based on multi-agent systems and continuous cellular automata (put into practice from the theoretical premises in Alan Turing’s paper “The Chemical basis of Morphogenesis” through reaction-diffusion simulation) is implemented in a voxel field at several scales giving the project a twofold quality: the implementation of reaction diffusion generative strategy within a non-isotropic 3-dimensional field and integration with the large-scale 3D printing fabrication system patented by D-Shape®.