Exhibition Design-Housing in Vienna-first fabrication tests

At the moment we are working on a new exhibition design, commissioned by the AzW in Vienna. The topic of the exhibition Housing in Vienna and deals with the quality of subsidized residential housing in Vienna. Vienna has an interesting history on this term, rooted in the red Vienna of the 20ies of the twentieth century. The efforts continued after the second world war, and by today Viennese authorities take pride in the tradition of providing the sector of social housing with the highest possible quality in terms of the architecture and living standard.The main focus of the exhibition lies on the projects of the last decade and the present. As we had to design the exhibition as a traveling exhibition we had to think about ease of setup, lightweightness and simple transport. Again we relied on the concept of pods, as we did also for The Austrian Winery Boom. (PS.: Still on show at the Austrian Cultural Forum in NYC)
This time we changed the way how the pods interact with each other. The show in New York relied on the combination of three different pods to form a family of objects. This time we used a mathematical tessellation as basis of the setup.

The Cairo Tessellation makes it possible to create one repeating pod that can be assembled in a manyfold way. Different groups of pods cover the various typologies of housing projects described in the exhibition.
The fabrication method: The computer generated form was divided into three sections: Upper Shell, Lower Shell and Limbs. In this way we saved pieces to be assembled to one pod. It´s only three pieces that fit into each other and are connected by small cable fasteners. The forms were milled as negatives by a three axis CNC milling machine. The molds were then casted into hard material to facilitate the vacumforming process. Yesterday I checked out the first test shells. Next week we hopefully will have a finished prototype, and then we can finish the fabrication of the pieces.