Virtual project

K a t h l e e n

K o p i e t z

3 9 1 0 5 4

MODULE 3 F A B R I C A T E

MODULE 2 - RECAP

The translation of my ideas on paper into the virtual world has been the most challenging aspect of this designing process. Learning the software while simultaneously attempting to achieve solid, finished designs has been a task with many iterations each and every one teaching me a new and valuable lesson.

The point I had reached at the end of module 2 was far from a complete stage. I was still in need of reaching a satisfying form with which I could apply some of the panelling techniques that I had refined,

Following on from module 2 I had to make some serious decisions about form. I had immersed myself in testing various types of panelling arrangements and perforation possibilities yet I was still unhappy about the form that those panels would be applied to.

I kept returning to the initial design drivers that I had identified in the previous modules especially the concept of growth and change over time. While considering this again, with the help of fresh outside opinion, I had a light bulb moment pertaining to this drawing that I had done right before launching into virtual modelling. This drawing shows one thing that I had forgotten in my conception of growth and time. These complex concepts are nonlinear, they change, ebb and flow, speed up and slow down, twist and turn and are also continuous.

Having redefined this integral concept that I was basing my whole design upon I was able to move forward and design a form that would fulfil this redefinition accordingly. Fitting tightly with my initial concept.

DEVELOPED FORM

So in search of the best way to panel and develop my new found form I performed a series of trials each developing the concept a little further each time.

I soon came to realise that I would struggle to build the highly perforated trials. The members would be too flimsy and i would need to spend a long time formulating ways to develop tabs and structures in order to hold the thing up.

I tested triangular panels, rectangular quads, diamond shaped panels and of course fiddled around with the frequency with which they would be articulated over the surface.

I came to the realisation that I really enjoyed the more angular panelled iterations because they took the form out of the realm of blobby and made it a more dynamic angular shape.

I also played around with different perforation models, I created several different shapes with which to panel and applied them to the surface.

Using grasshopper to morph the geometry onto the surface has proved quicker and easier for me than using panelling tools, however I have found that it lacks the random arrangement that I would like to achieve.

This is something that I will experiment with further.

REMODELLING FOR FABRICATION

In order to achieve an actual buildable model some sacrifices had to be made in terms of the panelling. Time is very precious at the moment so I need to achieve the best possible results in minimal time. For this reason I have chosen my favourite simply articulated design and will apply the perforations by hand.

I feel that this is the best way to create the random placement of the cuts and most time effective. I am sure that there are ways of using the computer to achieve what i am looking for however I am not yet advanced enough to achieve this.

This form is angular, is composed of six unrollable surfaces and will I hope lend itself well to manual perforating.

My retrialing resulted in the development of a form that was very much so concentrated on the continuous nature of time and the growth cycle. It is a constant repeating phenomenon that I sort to emulate in this circular form. The panelling is simple but the perforation is a variant on the drawing that I completed earlier and is retracing the stages of the life cycle by the size of the perforations changing over the form.

FORM TO UNROLL TOP VIEW

LEFT ELEVATION

RIGHT ELEVATION

PERSPECTIVE

FRONT

This is the final form that I decided to develop my aim was to clearly articulate it in paper so that It would be easy to build so that I could spend more time achieving the surface treatment that I desired.

BACK

UNROLLING PROCESS

The unrolling process was simply a matter of scaling the model up to 400mm in length, a size I had tested and decided would successfully articulate the shape and be intimate enough to express the lighting well rather than loose detail without being too big. I then joined each segment together and unrolled it as a strip.

Because I only had six strips in total to unroll I was able to easily pop them onto a 900 x 600 sheet in a fashion that logically explained which segment was which to me.

The red lines are etch lines and the black are the tabs. When printed it was evident that my tabs were very very small and quite difficult to work with. with the realisation that my model would not take up too much space on a 900 x 600 page I doubled up and printed another copy right beside it for prototyping and incase something went wrong.

PRECEDENT 1

10 HILLS PLACE Amanda Levete Architects, London High quality ship building techniques have been employed to express the sculptural facade of this inner city office building. It is a building inspired by Lucio Fontana’s AL_A art work with its slashed scores, but articulated in the built world with a great deal more fluidity, less anger and a great deal of pragmatism. The clever creation of the apertures ensure that light is transferred into the belly of the building , a feat traditional office windows would struggle to achieve.

It is a useful precedent for this stage of developing perforations that successfully deal with the presence of light.

Instead of getting light in I want light to emanate out, visible in the picture of the office on a dark day. Translated into paper the cut would need to be slightly more geometric and potentially with more of a hinge , so that the aperture can be covered.

PRECEDENT 2

As cited earlier in module 1 finally I was able to take direct inspiration from this Pavilion. The project directed my thinking about form building to look at the surface as a series of parts like the individual ‘leaves’ of the pinecone working together to build the form. Light is also interestingly dealt with, filtering thorough the gaps of the pavilion rather than being directed through particular apertures.

Coupled with the slices made by Amanda Levete in the Hills Place project a potential hybrid form is beginning to develop in my head.

A panel somewhere between the two, angular but with the same expressive light emanating outwards.

1:1 PROTOTYPE

Inspired by the windows of 10 Hills Place I experimented with a series of different cut patterns. To ensure that the model would perform as intended when fabricated I prototyped the most important segment. I first tested cutting patterns and found that the cutting of arrows was the most successful in achieving the pattern while still hiding the light away from view. This was then tested on a 1:1 scale segment of the model and was quite successful. It highlighted the difficulty involved in sticking the segments together and the need for the use of the hot glue gun to achieve the stick almost immediately.

CONSTRUCTION

First the model was cut out from the sheet laser cut from the FAB LAB. I added extra card onto some of the tabs just to ensure that they would stick properly.

Step two required the pattern of perforation to be drawn on to the interior of the segment before being cut and stuck together. To make sure that I knew where all of the segments would be arranged I formed up all of the pieces using bulldog clips and pliers to hold them in place. Satisfied with the arrangement I cut the panels and began to glue them all together. While cutting and gluing I was also making sure that I built around the lights so that they would fit snugly inside the lantern. As the form began to build up into the smaller sections gluing got trickier as the pieces were small and not terrifically easy to squeeze together.

It was not until right at the end of building when popping in the final segment that things really got tricky. The final segment would not fit snugly into its junction.

Somewhere between computerland, Fab-labbing, and my constructing there was an error and I had to improvise by squeezing the whole form in order to get the final piece to match up.

It was not perfectly articulated in the end however it was together thanks to some hot gluing in the right spots and some on the spot squeezing.

If I had more time to re-fabricate I would most definitely make my tabs bigger my shape bigger and potentially use a different sort of card. The Fab Lab card was nice and looks fine, however it failed a little when scored tending to peel apart leaving the surface rough and a little tacky.

1:1 FINAL MODEL

1:1 FINAL MODEL- TESTING LIGHTING EFFECTS

The little led lights create a really strong shock of light when turned on and filtrate out through the form even better than I could have hoped. Some of the cut flaps are closed, some wide open and others somewhere in between. I am quite happy with the way that the lantern looks in the dark. Possibly to extend the project further a reflective paper could be stuck on the inside surface to enhance the amount od light that emanates out or the form scaled up to see how that might effect the overall impact of the perforations.

1:1 FINAL MODEL - IN SITU

Critically compare the use of digitally enabled fabrication in your project and in professional practice:

Air Space Tokyo, Japan; by Faulders Studio is an interesting building that shows how digitally enabled design and fabrication can create striking outcomes.

The cellular design and double layers of the facade by Faulders are generated with the site’s rich bio history in mind. All those layers of original vegetation are represented in the two 20cm thick “skin”. Framing and blocking out the sun the vorenoi panels are layered to create depth and achieve these attributions more effectively.

The building has been realised thanks to the ‘file to factory work flow’1 the digital continuum that is becoming common practice with new today’s new technologies.

Gantenbein Winery is another example of the digital translation of ideas designed on computers into the physical world. The innovative use of materials in this winery is striking, the construction method is equally intriguing hence its addition here.

Mark Burry in his article Scripting Cultures highlights how technologies created in the computational realm are helping to re-appropriate old techniques.

This segues quite well into how this winery has been built with the humble brick along with some very advanced technologies to define its placement in the construction.

Although it may look like it took years to conceive and create the help of scripting driving the design process allowed for this winery to be built within a period of only three months.

The fabrication was the most interesting part and by no means a common method either. Firstly a photograph of a basket of grapes was taken and abstracted somewhat to get the best result. Then it was used to map the orientation of each brick.

The team then employed a robot which they programmed to construct the panels out of individually laid bricks. The angles at which the bricks were placed by the robot were determined by the brightness of individual pixels of the photograph of grapes and when built are constantly altering the overall facade as a result of the sun hitting the edges of the bricks.

The seventy-two panels that make up the facade were delivered on site via a truck and lifted into place with a crane. Brick is a useful material as it naturally tempers the peak outdoor temperatures, leaving it cooler inside for the barrels of wine. 2 It is a project that just shows how one can innovate by using old traditional materials configured with the use of digital fabrication techniques to develop a new and interesting design.

My design was not nearly as complex as these projects, however the capacity for its development further can be aided with the knowledge that digital fabrication techniques are increasingly making the impossible possible. Simple things such as large scale pattern cutting, the prefabrication of certain elements off site to mathematical precision saves valuable construction time, labour and is achieving great results. If given more time I would have liked to learn how to achieve more interesting patterning configurations with the computer, that could then be unrolled and digitally cut to be fabricated, definitely an aim for the future.

REFERENCES http://www.amandalevetearchitects.com/news/hills-place-complete/ http://www.archdaily.com/215249/dragon-skin-pavilion-emmi-keskisarja-pekka-tynkkynen-lead/23-pekka-tynkkynen/ http://faulders-studio.com/proj_airspace.html Kolarevic, Branko, Architecture in the Digital Age: Design and Manufacturing (New York; London: Spon Press, 2003), pp. 3 - 62 1. Burry, Mark (2011). Scripting Cultures: Architectural Design and Programming (Chichester: Wiley), pp. 8 - 71 2. Brownell, Blaine (2012). Material Strategies: Innovative Applications in Architecture (New York: Princeton Architectural Press), pp. 30 - 31