ART IN TRANSIT
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CONTENTS
IMMERSION
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FIRST MOVES
28 - 37
CONCEPTUALISATION
38 - 59
CONTENT GENERATION
60 - 71
ARRIVAL AT FINAL FORM
72 - 97
FINISHING
98 - 101
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IMMERSION
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BACKGROUND
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Four years ago, I joined Srishti just out of high school. I was told I had the ‘aptitude’ for a creative profession, but that didn’t mean quite that much to me until my interview for Srishti. I fit the exact description of a confused teenager then. I walked into that interview room and told them that I was interested to join one of the two: either the visual communications department or the product and industrial design department. Nobody responded to that for a while, but after 40 minutes of heavy note-taking, asking me why I would want to leave a city like Bombay, how was it that I had good grades and pathetic general knowledge at the same time, going through my portfolio, which was mainly small models out of soap, lego or wireframes and a whole lot of origami, and one very nervous fiasco on my part - of breaking and re-assembling one of my models, one of the faculty on my panel finally told me this, “Say you’ll do product or furniture design, and you’re in.” I obviously said it.
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It’s been anything but easy since, and today, I can say that I’ve explored and learnt more about myself and my practice than anything else. A few projects that I managed to do in these 4 years that I find worth mentioning now, especially as a preface to my journey with Art in Transit are: 1 - THE CHAIR Done as part of a material exploration course, I wanted to satiate my curiousity towards fabrication. Self-designed, self-fabricated. After the class crit, it went on to become a permanent resident at the campus cafe in the basement. And that’s just about when I realised what I enjoyed the most - public interation. They wore it down, flipped it over, poured water in the pipes and broke it. But to my mind, it had never looked better.
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2 - INSTALLATION FOR A BLIND SCHOOL Done with Ria Bajaj, as part of ‘Beyond Sight’ with Meera Curam. Exhibited at The Rangoli Metro Art Centre on MG road. People from outside of the art community saw it, interacted with it and gave us feedback. It was a strange experience for me, but it turned out to be the most valuable feedback I received as well.
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3 - MURAL AT THE ARMY INSTITUTE This was a client project, so we ended up taking only a few liberties under the brief. The interesting thing for me here was the reaction the public had. We finished it in a small duration, when nobody was on campus, and then they came back to this.
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PURPLE LINE The purple line of the Bangalore metro goes from MG road to Baiyapannahalli. It’s been around for longer, and is more in use. Considering all this, and the fact that we were more familiar with it, we decided to start exploring with this one first. Here are a few on-site sketches:
METAPHOR EXERCISE The exercise was to create an artefact based on a metaphor about the purple line of the mero in Bangalore. The metaphor that I came up with was how all the passengers of the metro behaved like droids. But two kinds of droids. One the kind that would still go about their actions the same way, but take in more. The other, the people that would just focus on the task at hand. Anything could go on around them, and they wouldn’t even blink or look up and out of the way. My artefact was a small foam sculpture depicting this duality.
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GREEN LINE Something that Amitabh told us in class before we visited Peenya that really stuck with me was, “There are no second first impressions. Think about how you want to see the station for the first time, and make it worth it.� I decided that I wanted to see it from the outside, on the highway, just like every other passerby would. So that is what I did. Eventually I found my way to the station, and here are the on-site sketches of my first visit:
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METAPHOR EXERCISE Similar to the first exercise done with the purple line, we had to make an artefact, one that depicted a metaphor that came up for us in our time at Peenya metro station. While riding the metro up and down, I kept thinking about it’s seemingly flawless integration into the city’s transport system. Obviously it wasn’t so, but hypothetically, if the city’s transportation system was a power circuit, the people would be the electrical current running through it, making it more than just a bunch of rubber-coated metal wires. The metro would then be the diode circuit, something the city would burn-out without. The community would essentially be something that the metro would prove useless without. Here are the illustrations I did for those:
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MAPPING EXERCISES
Another exercise we did to acquaint ourselves with the space, and to evoke it for ourselves through different filters, was mapping the area. To sort of get an idea of how we were going to do this in Peenya, we tried it first in our own area, Yelahanka. Taking our campus as a centre and a two kilometer radius around it, we divided the area into slices. Anusha and I tried to map through our senses. Sounds, smells and visuals that stuck with us. Color, volume and pungency were some of our parameters. Here is the final draft of our slice:
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MAPPING PEENYA I continued to map through experience, auditory experience to be specific. The varying intensities of sound and it’s many sources, at four different times of the day.
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COMMUNITY RESEARCH
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Getting into the residential areas of Peenya, I tried striking conversations with photographs or simple questions. After a few days of knowing them I’d get to interviews. The biggest challenge was to get them to trust me enough to talk to me. Mostly they all would go on to assume that I worked for the BMRC or for a media channel. A certain amount of reluctance was something I had expected to face. But some of the resident community of Peenya came to utright hatred. I got thrown out of houses, pushed away and had taken slammed doors in my face. But there were also the people who loved to talk. Who loved that I wanted their opinion. That somebody, an outsider, cared about what they thought. Here is a little transcription of one conversation: In one of the by lanes in the housing area behind the metro line, between Peenya and Peenya Industrial station, I asked a middle aged lady if I could photograph her house. She asked me why, very casually, to which I said because I like clicking photographs and sketching small beautiful structures. After she allowed me to take the picture, I showed it to her, and she smiled. I took this opportunity to start a conversation with her. “So your house is very close to the metro. Isn’t that convenient?” -- “No. It’s just disturbing. They’ve taken away our peace, especially in the afternoons. They don’t even take an afternoon break.” “What do you think about the metro? Do you like it?” -- “Does it really matter? We both know that my opinion, or anybody else’s opinion doesn’t matter. Not one bit. These people don’t care.” “What makes you say that? Don’t you think it’s made for the people? For your convenience. ” -- “It isn’t made for people like me. It’s made for people like you. And you use it. So they’re happy. Why would they care if they had to break down a few houses to do it? It’s poor people’s houses. They don’t matter.” “Break down houses? What do you mean?” -- “Yes. Break down houses. You see that row of broken buildings on the main road? They used to be houses. Of my friends. My neighbors. They’re gone now. Only half-broken buildings are left of their homes.” “Where have they gone? Your friends?” -- “Back to their villages, their hometowns. They understood it and so did we. People like us, don’t belong in such fancy places.”
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“Have you been on the metro even once?” -- “No. I would never.” “Why not give it a shot?” -- “No. No. Why would I? After everything they’ve done?! (Unintelligible mumbling) Go! Go away! Leave us little people alone here now. After which she turned away mumbling, walked into her house, and locked up. I had no option but to leave. And not just leave; be stared down by the entire colony for creating a scene. This lady was my first proper insight into the minds of the residents of Peenya, and my example in this area of exploration. She was followed by many such interviews and interactions. After a few more interviews and conversations with the resident community of Peenya, I came to realise a painful truth. They despise the Metro, and anybody who has anything to do with it. A few of the reasons I heard often were: 1 – It has claimed a lot of their transient space. 2 – Expensive and very sophisticated for the area, feels out of place. 3 – Houses were broken down to construct the metro. People were displaced out of their own homes. Right now, most of them are avoiding the metro space in general, which is keeping them stuck to their dislike towards it, or rather the idea of it. By giving them a space to be themselves, we can be an encouraging catalyst that allows them to venture more into that space - use it, talk about it, bring friends/family to the space and just basically initiate them to it, and use the scope there is to change their opinions about the metro itself, by replacing their negative associations with positive ones. So give them a space to claim, to turn into a community place.
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URBAN SPRAWL
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‘Dispersed, auto-dependent development outside of compact urban and village centres, along highways, and in rural countryside’ - as defined by Howard Frumkin, Lawrence Frank and Richard Jackson in ‘Urban sprawl and public health – designing, planning and building for healthy communities’. After speaking with the residents, I started secondary research. I came upon the phenomenon of urban sprawling, which is currently taking place in most developing countries. Literally, it means ‘to spread or develop irregularly’. It became clear to me that over the past decade, Peenya had been undergoing just that; with the highway, then the multiple flyovers; the construction of the metro had just pushed the resident community over the edge. Sprawling is something that is done with the future in mind. This leads to a certain disregard to the present, the experience of the space at a pedestrian level. Everything is now being designed to automobiles, in keeping with the new pace we are all setting ourselves up for. Yes it works better, and it serves the purpose, but in the phase that Peenya is in now, it becomes very difficult for the residential community to cope with all these things. And this is something I too, personally experienced there, and something the community didn’t talk about much but certainly struggled with. One cannot walk without feeling afraid of the many vehicles manoeuvering their way around them. And the noise. That is just too overwhelming. Yes, their landscape changed. Yes, it’s better. But in the moment, at the pedestrian level, did the change in scale sink in? Are the accustomed to it? Did they see it coming? The answers are obvious. I’m not out to change them. Or to fight for them. But how could I make this better for them? How could I possibly help them cope better? These are the questions I posed to myself, and continue to do even today.
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FIRST MOVES
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SITE
The space that I’ve chosen is the triangular space right next to the metro station. It forms a junction of three roads, and it houses four pillars that hold up one end of the metro station. It measures upto 130’ X 70’ X 170’. Reasons for choosing this space: 1 2 3 4 5
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Next to the metro station, material language is the same. Visibility. Relates to the metro station immediately. Shade. Existing architecture has potential.
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SEPTEMBER EXHIBITION The one filter that had been constant throughout my research, and every exercise that I’d done so far, was the fact that I was looking through pedestrian experience. So after I picked my site, the first thing I could think of was how to make the space inhabitable and how to enhance the pedestrian experience. Since my chosen site is next to the highway, it proves to be very overwhelming to be in that space for longer periods of time. And the aural experience is jarring, if anything. So a simple solution that I came to, was to create an acoustic barrier on one side of the space. This in turn would also give any intervention that would take place in that space a back drop. For the exhibition at hand, we went with something that would give proof of concept more than something that would be fully functional.
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RE-WORKING THE WALL: To have it work like an acoustic barrier, I figured out a mathematical sequence. 30 degree angle, air gap behind, such that sound is either reflected or absorbed, in that particular order. The intended material was a sound absorbing board called Gyproc.
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INSIGHTS
This ‘wall’ started out as an acoustic barrier, to basically make the space a little more inviting and comfortable. Since the larger plan was to add public furniture to the space, making it inhabitable was the first thing we thought of doing. The highway and the flyover run parallel to the station and the metro line, and thus to the site. They were the biggest acoustic disturbances, so the best option was to have acoustic boards such that they reflect and absorb sound from there. This meant that one entire side of the triangle space would have to be covered. It would provide a background to anything we were planning then, but as we went on to prototype and ended up making a part of it for the september exhibition, we realised that it had turned into a wall. Somewhere along the line of handling acoustics, we’d ended up erecting a literal wall between the community and the station. Through my entire exploration process, mapping, and research; all I’d wanted to do was bridge that gap, not by any drastic moves, but just by having people interact with the space and inhabit it. And now, I’d lost all that in the process of that one exhibition, and gotten carried away into execution. This phase of reflection on what had happened made me think about what was really required to make a space inhabitable - was it just the noise levels that kept people away? Or did it have something to do with the general demeanour of the space itself? Could I approach this problem from a simpler, more informed perspective, and still encourage usage of the site without treating it just like any other interior and furniture design project?
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MOVING FORWARD
Moving forward from the idea of the wall, I decided to take what I’d learnt through it, and simplify. I came down to some basic conclusions that then led to my next steps. 1 - I didn’t need to provide everything in that space and enforce interaction through what I know. As learnt from observation, people make a space work, not the other way around. 2 - In order to bring people to it, there needed to be something that could catch their attention enough to want to go explore it. 3 - Sticking to my more basic instincts was a better idea than going the generic way - I didn’t need to stick to benches and steps and other sorts of public furniture, it didn’t feel like me, and something that I enforce upon myself will never get my fullest. 4 - Playfulness is always appreciated. It makes everything a little bit lighter and easier to deal with, and definitely ‘breaks the ice’. 5 - Anything and everything that would inhabit that space would have to be a response to site, since detaching my work from the site was making no sense to me, and was seeming contextually out of space.
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CONCEPTUALISATION
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JUNGLE GYM
Hoping to add an element of play to the space, maybe give the community something that they can use the way they’d like to. One thing I got down from my earlier observations is that people, no matter who and where, always prefer furniture that they can use their own way. Move it, sit in places they aren’t supposed to, etc. Nobody likes being told what to do - especially by stationary objects. So, give them something that has numerous ways of sitting, multiple combinations of seating, etc. One thing I did want to establish was that age wouldn’t matter for the jungle gym. It will continue to be playful, but not in the literal sense of a swing and a see-saw. And keeping in mind materials, considering load bearing capacities, weather, accesibility and then the look. Here are a few initial iterations of that:
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INSIGHTS
The purpose of a jungle gym as opposed to regular public furniture was to add an element of play to the space, while still providing seating opportunities and more. Eventhough all of these designs served the purpose, they seemed too tame, too out of context and way too standard.
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THE UNDERBELLY
Somewhere while trying to ideate through form, I started thinking about how this was something of permanence. Once established, nobody would move it. Nobody would really take away anything from it, or even add; it’s surroundings would change around it, but most of the time, it would just be by itself. Like a creature that lives in the wall cracks of old caverns, never known or acknowledged, but always there. This ‘jungle gym’ would be situated right under the metro line. This got me thinking about all the other beings that inhabit the underbelly of such big permanent structures and how my intervention will nearly be a part of that group soon. I could not shake that idea off. Every time I’d visit site, or attempt to ideate for my chosen site, I’d keep imagining a world full of creepy crawlies that don’t look that bad up close, but when you step away, they become a swarm or an army of beings, in their own world. After going through a plethora of beings, like lizards, rats, dragonflies, bats, and squirrels; I settled on spiders as my primary inspiration. I’ve always found them very intriguing, especially in the way that they move and the structure of their legs. I figured they would be my best inspiration for this space.
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FIRST MOVES
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INSIGHTS
Even though all of these ideas were a bit preliminary, this entire time gave me a closer look to the way I can express my vision, and it gave me a lot of clarity on my own practice - in terms of how I approach the public realm as an artist. Even through my research, I thought that I would end up doing a community based project. But through this time, I learnt that this was my way of dealing with things - even in reality - like miscommunication, or being stuck in a situation where two people I know don’t enjoy each other’s company very much. It only made sense for me to make this jump into what seemed to come to naturally.
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REALISTIC SKETCHES Another habit that I somehow managed to cultivate through this time, was to talk to people about my process and my ideas and my practice, and take their feedback. In one such strange conversation with my friend’s uncle, is when I heard this: “It’s good what you’re trying to do, but look at your drawings and then look at what you decided to finalise as your furniture. To me, the way you perceive things is interesting, but the way you’re showing it is just...it’s just too spidery. It’s too literal, and not in an intentional obvious way. And that is what I think you should not do. Don’t pretend to be something you’re not.” He was right. This was followed by me trying to evoke space for me in different ways. The first of these, was to go back to my inspirations, and understand them, just so I can isolate what really inspired me, and then use those qualities better. These are the sketches from that time:
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RE-VISITING SITE
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Eventhough my process was now getting clearer, I couldn’t apply it to my site very well. Anything I was doing, was feeling detached from site, and it just didn’t seem to make the connection. A lot of it had to do with the fact that this was intimidating for me. The scale at which I was working. The fact that this was going to be a permanent installation. The fact that this is public space, and I’m going to claim a significant amount of it. So, I decided to just spend a few days on site, and while simultaneousy attempting to resolve my forms, I started thinking about my bigger inhabitation.
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MOVEMENT VIDEO In order to understand and visualise my inhabitation on site, I decided to use movement. Personally, I’ve always had a better taking to kinesthetic learning, and dancing is one of my hobbies, so I did this in order to give myself a clearer idea, and to evoke the movement of the form for myself. I invited a professional dancer to come in, and gave her a few inputs as to height and elevation and just a basic path. The rest of it was her expression through movement, something that really helped me translate my ideas to form.
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CONTENT GENERATION
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PLAYFULNESS In a stage where I was focusing on content generation, I decided to articulate what this concept of playfulness really encompassed for me. I came down to four smaller categories under this big umbrella that I was exploring, 1 - Scale 2 - Color 3 - Repitition 4 - Form
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INSIGHTS
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Even though this phase was very generative for me, I found myself in the most confused position I could’ve been in. Singularly, all my content and my ideas were sound, but every time I had tried to put them together, everything was disparate. (as seen in the image to the left) One comment I got as part of my class crit, “If a stranger who knows nothing about your project were to walk into your space and see all these elements there, they would probably just think that five different artists had created these things, and that too without being in conversation with each other until the very day of the opening.” Difficult as that was to swallow back then, I took it with a pinch of salt and decided to move forward from it. My basic problem was fixing on a language to embody my already existing ideas, but I didn’t want to pick. Not unless it came to me naturally. Not unless it felt right.
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URBAN VISION Urban Vision in Kandivali, Mumbai, invited Art in Transit as a team to do multiple murals. Their project is about re-activating public space through visual art, and they gave us a simple brief - every five to ten minutes while walking from point A to point B, there should be a mural. I decided to work with gates, and the first one I did was this:
Eventhough the community there was happy to have some paint on their walls, it was not something that was even my practice, and it definitely was not something I wanted to leave behind. So with their permission, I decided to whitewash this wall entirely, giving them a freshly painted wall as well.
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The next piece I did was at the gate of a green building. It’s one of their projects itself, and they have vertical gardens, and they promote sustainable living in the area. Not a lot of the locals knew the purpose of this building, but they knew it had something to do with ‘plants’. As a response to the site, and to get more attention to it, I decided to paint creepers on the gate, in my general style. The reason I decided to do this is only to evoke the feeling through the color and the placement.
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WHY THIS FORM?
This form was there even in my earlier drawings, and it kept repeating in different ways, as ply cutouts, as metal rings and even as a wall crawler. To my mind, even when I drew it out, it represented something between a worm and a seahorse. I fixed on this one form in particular because of it’s simplicity. Somehow the modular nature left a lot of room for play, a lot of possibilities, and it seemed like something that could be expanded easily. Possibilities. That is all this form had over the rest.
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MATERIAL
Given that this is a permanent installation, and that it is going to be outside the station, I had a few limitations like permanence of material, weathering, how to install it, and strength. Keeping all this in mind, I came down to two options. Here is the first round of costing for the single ‘bench’ piece in the respective materials:
MATERIAL: Mild Steel(MS) pipes or Galvanized Iron(GI) pipes - 3”(80mm) outer diameter COSTING: MS A class - Rs. 434/m = Rs. 24,000 approx (nominal thickness - 3.25mm) MS B class - Rs. 509/m = Rs. 28,000 approx (nominal thickness - 4.05mm) MS C class - Rs. 593/m = Rs. 33,000 approx (nominal thickness - 5.40mm) GI A class - Rs.545/m = Rs. 30,000 approx (nominal thickness - 3.25mm) GI B class - Rs.636/m = Rs. 35,000 approx (nominal thickness - 4.05mm) GI C class - Rs. 745/m = Rs. 41,000 approx (nominal thickness - 5.40mm)
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ARRIVAL AT FINAL FORM
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ITERATIONS
First few iterations
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First few iterations
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Playing with the curves
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Adding curves in plan view
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Trying out bolder curves and heights
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Changing the spacing according to playground regulations
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Changing the pipe diameter and playing with the spacing
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Bringing the height to playground regulations
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Experimenting with sharper curves and different width
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Going back to previous renders and combining different properties
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Adding handholds and planning for installation
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Finalising on the properties of the form - Mild steel pipes 2” diameter - Keeping the height to a maximum of 6’ if not supported by understructures - Keeping the distance between two pipes a minimun of 3” - Ground the piece, so as to ensure safety - Add handholds every 9” to facilitate climbing
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EXPANDING THE WORM
Attempting the expansion through repitition of form
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TRying different thicknesses and sizes
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Few attempts at the expansion
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Few attempts at the expansion
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Going back to paper in order to have clarity of the flow of all pieces as one
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Going back to paper in order to have clarity of the flow of all pieces as one
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Trying to visualise it on site
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Trying to visualise it on site
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Changing positioning according to site and by physically creating the curves
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Changing positioning according to site and by physically creating the curves
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DIGITAL RENDERS
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Digital visualisation on site of the pieces
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FINISHING
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PROTOTYPE
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Learnings from prototype: - Better to use complex curves for the look and to delete fabrication errors - The bigger the better - Definitely needed to paint it - Angle welding is also better
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Harleen Chatha