6421: Digital Craft

I am taking a class at the GSD this term titled Digital Craft, taught by Veronika Schmidt. The aim of the class is to construct an installation in the GSD using a combination of digital fabrication techniques and hand "craft" techniques.

My group (including Greg Tran, Victor Lorenzo and Kelly Provot) is planning an installation on the balconies/fire exit stairs on the north side of Gund Hall (pictured below).

Our project uses the tie-holes in the concrete wall as an infrastructure to support the growth of artificial "ivy" made with generic Schedule 40 PVC pipe and custom fabricated joints. We hope to populate the empty tie holes with various types of joints, and "grow" the piping across the wall.

The installation explores ideas about the relationship between generic and custom construction components, while also aiming to "soften" the shear concrete face of the wall, using a material palette that imitates the internal structural/hvac elements of the GSD.

Connect-the-dots strategies for "ivy" growth:

The support concept is to fabricate custom joints that will friction-fit inside the existing tie-holes, and be able to support a number of PVC pipes. The negative mold for the joint will be 3D printed with the Polyjet, and multiple copies will be produced by pouring a rubber casting material into that mold.

Possible growth patterns:

Views from the 5th floor level:

Joint testing on-site:

Heat bending pvc tubes by (mis)using the shop vacuform machine:

On site single module mockup:

Next steps: fabricate several mock-ups of the mold to test for its capacity to carry the weight of the PVC. Based on the time it takes to cast a single mold, we can determine (given the short amount of time left) how many tie holes we will be able to populate.

Also - test out glow-in-the-dark spray paint on the pvc. During the day, the pipes will appear as solid white elements contrasting against the concrete wall. At night, they will begin to glow and create an interwoven illumination pattern.

New Mini-Portfolio

I just finished putting together my new mini portfolio/resume. The portfolios were printed on 1-ply museum board, cut to fold into the size of a single standard envelope, and placed within a custom-cut and printed envelope.

I went through several iterations to of the booklet, testing different formats, orientations, packaging methods. Some photos below:

1313: More

1313: Foundation for Creation Museum

(For a detailed overview of the project, please visit the Convergence studio blog. My initial programming studies are also available here.)

Some recent work-in-progress images below:

The museum is organized as a series of differently scaled gallery "towers". Visitors can circulate between towers through an enclosed interior space between them.

Studies for the gallery towers:

Niches carved into the exterior of each gallery tower accommodate multi-media art installations, and allow visitors to enter into the interior gallery spaces.

1313: Convergence Blog

Our studio blog is now up and running. Check it out at:

1313 Convergence

2408: Inorganic Assemblies

This term I am taking a class with Marc Fornes from theverymany titled Inorganic Assemblies. So far we have been learning computational form generation techniques using Rhinoscript, and working towards designing and fabricating a large installation within Gund Hall.

Below are some images from scripts in development:

1313 : Week 01 : Mobile Museum

Our first exercise was the design of a Mobile Museum in the spirit of Shigeru Ban's Nomadic Museum (as an aside, Ban is currently teaching an options studio at the GSD focusing on temporary structures for disaster relief).

The Mobile Museum is conceived as a temporary, prefabricated and flexible exhibition space for art. We were asked to iterate a single design theme through several variations, using only manual model making methods to prototype design ideas.

My design process focused on a the development of a deployable and flexible structural system for the exhibition space. The exhibition space is conceived as a reconfigurable open hall, populated by mobile pavilions capable of absorbing program that requires additional enclosure or spatial definition. Towards the end of the exercise I studied several variations of a triangulated grid-shell type structure based on Yoshimura buckling patterns and origami folding techniques.

GSD 1313: Convergence

This spring I am taking part in Edwin Chan's options studio entitled GSD 1313: Convergence. The studio seeks to interrogate the interface between physical and digital design processes.

Since the early 90s, three-dimensional digital working methods have become the default mode of design within architectural practice. Manual design methods such as physical model making have been largely neglected as design tools, and relegated to supporting roles as representational techniques.

The studio argues that analog, intuitive, and manual methods are powerful techniques for conceptualizing, developing and testing architectural design. Rather than abandoning these techniques, the studio seeks to merge their strengths with those of advanced digital modelling and fabrication.

The sophisticated physical/digital working method developed by Gehry Partners and Gehry Technologies will be staged as a point of departure in order to develop other hybrid methodologies.

Please click here to read the official studio brief.

In addition to my blog, in the next weeks I will be developing a blog for the entire studio where we will post regular updates on our work and methodological explorations. As soon as the site is up and running I will post it here.