Inspired by the movie Avatar and cellular structures of plants, this project is a catalogue of a series of colorful formal explorations and interpretations of flower petals, juxtaposing modern and parametric formal logic with the soft organic mesh that we started with. The goal is to transform softness and fragility into an ‘alien-like’ and strange formal interpretation and display using the logics of swarm and physics computation.

According to the article “The role of petal cell shape and pigmentation in pollination success in Antirrhinum majus” published in Nature, selective pressures have resulted in the conical-papillate shape of the adaxial epidermis cells of many petals may mean more intense color and enhanced tactile qualities of the petals (Nature, 1998). Inspired by this finding and the biomimicry structures in Avatar, we applied bio-inspired structural properties and colors to petal meshes using grasshopper and C#. We used swarm model to test out parametric shells using Grasshopper C#. We also used physics computation to test expansion and contraction of the form.