top of page

CORALYTE

CORALYTE is a site specific installation designed, fabricated, and installed by Emergent Design for our Artisan's Asylum 30-day residency. CORALYTE creates a spatial experience that changes as you move through it, giving the sensation of being inside a coral ecosystem. Inspired by the skeletal remains of coral polyps, the proportions of CORALYTE were designed to bring a first person experience of coral to the human scale.

Computationally designed and digitally fabricated, the self-supporting structure is laser cut from 146 sheets of bristol paper, and is fully assembled without the use of glue, tape, or permanent fixtures - only binder clips. CORALYTE is over 13 feet tall and 17 feet wide. Through a simulated physics-based formfinding process, CORALYTE was designed such that each piece is in tension with each other, leading naturally to a structurally resilient form.

New Video

Play Video

CORALYTE is made up of over 1,400 paper strips of connected triangles, with more than 3,000 individual triangle faces and 2,000 binder clips. To manage these large numbers, we employed numerous computational and data management strategies. The overall form was broken into 20 subassemblies, and each subassembly was run through a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) process to generate the strips. This allowed us to maximize and minimize several variables concurrently: minimize the total number of strips, maximize the length of each strip, and guarantee no single-face strips.