The Floating Palazzo — An Architect's Fantasy

Opening presentation of the first ever HIVEalt, London, September 2026.

The Palazzo started three years ago as a concept by my friend Richard Neal, and it is the project that got me into using Houdini for architecture. I began modeling the facade by hand, stone by stone; a few changes to the windows, floor slab and courtyard screens meant remodeling from scratch, so I went back to the drawings and looked for the logic instead. The stone turned out to be four rules stacked on top of each other. The windows turned out to be one tool: solving the three-arch window solved every other window on the building.

Once the model could rebuild itself on demand, it became the sandbox for learning pyro, FLIP, particles and Vellum in Houdini — which is how a modeling exercise ended up as a short film.