With Rumble out of the way, we’ve figured out the details of the five “pavilions” for our Ultra Expo exhibition, the final project for Sylvia Lavin’s class of the same title, to be held at JANM from July 13th-20th. Above is the flier for the event, which has been a long ten weeks in the making. Hope you’ll be able to join us!
Here’s the vinyl graphic I was working on for the US Pavilion:
A classmate noted that our studio was one of the topics covered in a recent blog post by Rennie Tang & Houston Drum about UCLA’s Rumble:
We have a 3d print of our site that we wanted to display for Rumble – we got it from Shapeways, and it just barely arrived in time. The cool thing about the 3d print, though, is that it came out translucent, thanks to its minimal thickness. I’d laid claim to the 3d printing process, and so it fell to me to design the stand upon which the model sat. I thought it might be fun to play with the translucency in the base for the stand, and developed the following concept:
Basically, it involved building a model stand fitted to the 3d print, with hidden casters so we could move it around, and an opaque white acrylic top to diffuse light from below. The setup would also involve a door on the backside of the stand, so that lights could be turned off when not in use, and a shelf upon which the lights would rest. Here’s the finished product from above:
And here’s Richard Weinstein taking a closer look:
In studio, Neil has asked us to evaluate more parameters, but also to design at a human scale, which is one thing most parametric urbanist projects aren’t talking about. Parameters, you say? As it turns out, I have several of my own up my sleeve, having been dabbling in the realm of Grasshopper to form base units for our towers. It’s crazy because there’s an architecture and a beauty to the equations required to make a digital form, but so far the forms themselves are pretty bland. It would seem like an easy task to do something like tilt the axis of a building – and, in practice, it is. The problem is making the tilt less arbitrary. In Rhino, I can model something, then align the things I’ve modeled along a curve that’s tilted to whatever angle I choose. That’s all fine, but I really don’t want to go through the operations of tilting each tower when I have, say, 37 of them. That’s thirty-six repetitions of a task – which is where Grasshopper comes in. But it actually takes a few additional steps in GH to make it happen – it’s not just drawing a line – it’s drawing a line, defining its endpoints, and moving the endpoints, then redrawing the line to the new endpoints. Craziness. Now, at least, it’s up and running, but it took a lot of thinking on paper, like this:
Heather has been encouraging all of us to take our fabric studies and attempt to model them exactly as we’ve made them, which is presenting a unique challenge: it’s pretty easy to twist a piece of fabric, but it’s a lot harder to model a strip of twisted fabric. I thought I might start by first building the flat plane of the fabric, then try to move it in 3d space, but that’s just not working, as the dimensions of that planar surface chance when I move its control points around in space. Heather has told us that there too much immediacy in modeling strips – and I’m not entirely sure what that means. Anyway, here’s a sketched attempt at understanding the way that we’ve folded the fabric into a collar (I left the grid lines in as a modeling aid for later):
…and here’s what the fabric model looks like:
