10 posts tagged “advanced fabrication”
This is a recent competition entry for a retail chain in Japan The Blossom Store The store concept
Blossom explores the
opportunities present in the morphologies of floral entities as point of
departure for the design of architectural conditions. The sensorial and spatial
experiences co-notated with the manifold qualities of blooming flowers, from
their topological qualities and the distribution of sepals and petals to form
the body of the flower, are scrutinized for their architectural qualities and
incorporated in the design of Blossom. Even the olfactory qualities could be implied as
substantial part of the design. To include the programmatic elements of a store
the concept of delamination is applied. In delaminating layers from the
surrounding envelope of the store, pockets of varying sizes are generated.
These pockets include, according to their size elements like office, storage,
changing booths and elements that could be used as presentation tablets.
System:
Although the
designs visual appearance is of heterogeneous nature, the underlying logic of
the design is informed by a repetitive system related to the allover theme of
floration. Nodes represent the core components of the system, connecting a
specific variety of petals. This system of node and petal form the innermost
layer of the delamination effect described above. The second layer provides the
store with the necessary depth to include programmatic points, tagging along
the node and petal system in its morphology. The third layer is comprised by a
simple box, which represents in the renderings a possible space provided for the
store in an existing building. This outermost layer bears a vivid coloration in
order to bleed the color into the glossy white interior.
The described system is highly pliable, providing a wide range of opportunities for various setups. It can be applied to different envelopes, independent from their shape. Additionally the various layers can be used in multiple combinations to populate different environments. The store can occupy an empty space, it can be setup to perform as a pavilion by combining the two inner layers, or it can accommodate itself in a shop-in-shop scenario by using the innermost layer only. Appearance
Fabrication:
The fabrication process relies on computational fabrication methods extensively. The nodes, the most complex part of the project, are CNC milled elements. These nodes are connected by the petals, which comprise of water jet cutted flat panels. These panels are laminated to provide the necessary structural integrity. In order to reduce the energy consumption in this project a twofold method is applied: On the one hand the strict application of computational workflow in the design and fabrication process, providing the chance to minimize material and energy consumption in the making. On the other hand the use of natural, biologically degradable materials to minimize pollution effects. Some of the possible solutions include the use of pressed cocoa fibers panels, wood for the nodes, biopolymers for the glossy white coating, and OLEDS (Organic Light Emitting Diodes) for the illumination of the space.
Today we received a couple of 3D printed models for the show Float. The exhibition will open upcoming Friday in the Gallery Zeitkunst, in Kitzbühel. In case you don´t know Kitzbühel, it is one of the favorite ski resorts for the wealthy of this planet, on the same level as St Moritz or Cortina. It is also the home of the winter seasons sport highlight, the famed Hahnenkamm downhill race. The exhibition in Kitzbühel will feature works by Franz Schubert, Fritz Biedermann and SPAN. We will show a series of huge high resolution Lambda prints, depicting digitally generated blossoms, in high glossy black, Animations of Blossoms and components as well as some 3D prints of the digital model. You can see a couple of images of the models below.
Here are a couple of images of the test assembly we put together yesterday. We tested if everything works as we planed, and how long it needs to setup a portion of the exhibition "Housing in Vienna". The record for building up one pod was set by Phillip, one of the AzW´s hands, with 3min and 42 sec. The Podium of the Architekturzentrum Wien (AzW) doubled as impromptu exhibition space, providing enough space for one colony which at the end had a size of 20ft by 9ft. This colony consisted of eight individuals. Now the entire population consists of forty pods, you get an image of the final appereance.
Today we assembled the first prototype of the pods for the exhibition Housing in Vienna. The pieces fit perfectly into each other. We tested a couple of variations of how to include the illumination within the bumps of the pod. The fabrication of the shells will be finished this week, so that the guys at the AzW can finish applying the graphic designs on the transparent top of the pod. Early January we are going to assemble an entire colony of pods to demonstrate the exhibition setting to the Vienna housing authorities who commissioned the exhibition design.
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 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.
Time to catch up! A month after the exhibition opening at the ACF in NYC I was invited to come back and join a Winesalon, held by the Vienna Tourism Office. The invitation by the new director of the Vienna Tourism Office, Norbert Kettner, yielded the possibility to talk about the exhibition design and the allover approach to the guests of the winesalon.
The Vienna Design Week is on full throttle now with an enormous variety of exhibitions and venues. Within this events I joined a panel discussion in the Musemsquartier to present the work of SPAN in terms of design. The panelists included Dag Holmgren, Elisabeth Menasse-Wiesbauer (Zoom-Kindermuseum), Sybille Straubinger, James Skone and Matias del Campo. The discussion oscillated between pedagogical concepts, ideas on general design approaches and advanced technologies and individualisation of products. Not the newest page on the book, but it seems that there is still a lot to do in terms of informing the public realm in Vienna about possibilities and chances emerging from novel design and fabrication methods, and the entire discussion in terms of the adjanced discoursive body. The new director of the Vienna tourism office, Norbert Kettner, was also present and showed a lot of expertise within this topics, I really enjoyed discussing with him aspects of innovation in form, beauty and esthetics. He pointed out the idea to discuss design in terms of beauty, surface articulation and patterns is deeply rooted within Viennese culture. If I would state an opinion I would say it WAS rooted within this ideas 100 years ago or so, but that mainly Viennese designers have fallen into the same monotone chorus of modern paradigms of design. Maybe it could become again a focus of design by picking up contemporary design methods, advanced fabrication methods and join the discussion on novel issues.
Thank you to Gerin Trautenberger of the Company Microgiants, for inviting me to present some of my projects and discuss within this very interesting group of people.
So, all the panels are now in the Workshop of the Architekturzentrum Wien (Az W) most of them are finished, only the graphic parts have to be applyed yet. Here you can see a couple of images of the Module C, the smallest of the three modules. The bottle fits pretty good into the craddle that was included in the vacuforming process.
A mood rendering of the ACF by night, when there are no visitors around......so only the surveillance cameras will see it like this..
Here is an image of the first shells. The transparency is even better than I expected, no opaqueness. Tomorrow we will assemble a first complete prototype to check out how the illumination looks best, and how we can handle the connection detail between the panels best.
Following an invitation by Florencia Pita, professor of architecture at SCI-Arc and head of architecture firm FPmod, Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger held a lecture about the research work and design progress within their practise SPAN as well as presenting the AMM Network. The AMM Network (Advanced Materials and Manufacturing) is, simply put, a research laboratory of the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, dedicated to the research on progress in digital design means for architecture and the adjanced fabrication methods and advanced materials. The lecture encompased issues such as the combination of digital design excellence and computer controlled fabrication methods, the status quo of this approach as well as contemporary developments within the field in terms of design, software, fabrication method and materials. Concluding the lecture were examples of materials and digital fabrication methods, still in the phase of evaluation, but with potential for further development, such as contour crafting, tissue engineering, transgenic materials and more.
