Put a single point of influence into a system and let everything else respond — its geometry, its openness, its orientation. Designers use exactly this to make façades breathe with the sun and surfaces ripple with attention. Move the source; watch the whole field answer.
Same idea, a different response. Here a solid panel is punched with holes, and each hole widens as it nears the attractor and shrinks as it moves away — the surface opening its pores where attention falls.
Drag the point across the panel; add a second one and watch the perforation breathe between them.
Make the attractor a whole curve. Every tile measures its distance to the line, swelling and warming where the curve runs close, lying flat and pale where it's far — and turning to follow the curve's flow.
The result is a seam of light articulating the field. Drag the handles to redraw the curve and the seam follows.
An attractor tells you where. It says nothing about how far, and that second question is the one that decides what the building looks like.
Take the same two points and change only the curve that turns distance into influence. A linear falloff gives you a flat, mechanical ramp. An inverse one concentrates everything into a hot spot and leaves the rest inert. A gaussian gives soft, photographic pools. Nothing moved. The architecture changed completely.
Then decide how two attractors argue. Take the nearest — the smaller of the two distances — and you get a hard crease where their territories meet: a Voronoi seam, visible as a ridge running between them. Turn up the blend and that crease melts into a saddle, the two fields welding into one continuous surface. That operation is the smooth minimum, and it is the same weld that fuses two shapes together in the geometry chapter — applied here to distance, before the falloff ever sees it.
Start with a single unit of the skin. Closed, it's a solid triangle that shades the glass behind it. As it opens, the three flaps fold inward and the triangle pleats into a three-pointed star — letting daylight spill through the gaps.
Slide it from shut to open, or tap the panel. The dashed line shows the closed shape it folds away from.
Now the single panel, multiplied into a skin — Abu Dhabi's Al Bahr Towers. Every triangular unit folds shut where the sun strikes hardest, shading the glass, and opens into a star where the light is soft. Drag the sun across the face and turn its strength up and down.