Monday, December 10, 2007

96 Pieces


Last week I got to spend a couple of nights sanding pink foam things like these

with lots of tender-lovin-care... and spackle. It's Hanyun's gigantic architectural model, in many many beautiful undulating parts.

John was sanding too.

Christian took a break from sanding to coat this bulbous thing with resin.

Hanyun had taken up residence at the Advanced Wood Product Lab. I never knew such a wonderland of possibility existed on the west side of midtown. And why do Architecture students get to have so much cooler toys than students of Sculpture?


Their massive machines can take CAD files and make complex precision cuts, like MDF board into landscape elevations or like 96 slices of pink foam in complicated organic shapes


that get put together into something crazy like this.


Did I mention this is a concept design for a modular home?



Hanyun is pretty chipper for not having slept for two weeks.


Sexiest housing unit you have ever seen right?


And it comes in a variety of colors. The real house would be built of pre-cast concrete cladding with steel beams for structural support and wood paneling on the interior.

The design is a study for mass production and digital fabrication as part of a masters of architecture class at Tech. The design was inspired from the study of knitting and the difference between hand and machine knitted stitches. (Note the stitch graphics at the bottom of the pic) It also has something to do with the "bifurcation process" but I have no idea what that means despite it having been explained to me. But you can learn yourself about it here.


The design is broken down into 96 concrete slices for manufacturing and assembly.


Or 96 slices of foam in this case.


The model is 1:20th the scale of the real deal. Which means it's pretty f-ing big, I should know I helped carry it up three flights of stairs, luckily the model wasn't made out of concrete. I for one think Shirley should go ahead and hand over the keys to Ms. Huang and let her remedy the heinous condo situation plaguing Atlanta.

4 comments:

H to the N said...

The stress of building this darn model made my thesis proposal feel like a breeze these few days. Maybe I am still stuck in the delirium of those sleepless nights... Nice entry!

Anonymous said...

Coolio, thanks for the inside look, J.
-ch

Jonathan said...

I imagine every future model will seem like a breeze compared to this.

Anonymous said...

By the way, J, you should check out some of the dialog going on now at the Atlanta Creatives Project blog--there's some of that broad-based discussion starting to go on that you were thirsting for.
-ch