architecture.computation.photography.culture
One of the classes I teach focuses on the integration of digital processes in architecture and fabrication. The final assignment for the class it 3D mill a mould from polystyrene and then pour concrete into it to create a solid ‘pattern’. I needed to prove to the students how quickly this could be done, and that it actually worked so here are some images of the proof of concept. A bigger post will follow once the class is complete.
An early start awaited me this morning for the 6am bus to Launceston. Fresh snow on the mountain and ice on the windshield. All I was thinking about was the sun and the sand (i lie actually, i like the cold better than summer).
It has been way too long since my last post, so I’m going to start posting more random things on a more regular basis. This way the blog will be updated a little more often. So here is the first of what i hope to be a lot more new posts. This photo was taken a while back, and similar to the huge library of photos sitting on my hard drive, was dying to to be put online.
As a part of my teaching with the University of Tasmania I run a class called ‘Building Simulation’. This semester I set my students the task of selecting a famous house constructed during the past 10 years as a case study. The first assignment was to represent the building using vectorworks and archicad. The second assignment was to translate the previous digital information into cinema4D and create static and animated visualisation materials from it. Being very digital-to-fabrication orientated, the final assingment was to translate the 3D virtual model into drawings suitable to create scale model of the house and fabricate the model on the schools CNC 3-axis router.
Maison Bordeaux (oma) Dale Cromley + Josh Stones
I gave the students a limitation of 3mm MDF and 1.5mm acrylic as the pallet of materials and set 1:100 as the scale for all groups. After that it was pretty much at the students whim to add as much (or little) detail in and present it in the best possible way. I placed a lot of focus on the documentation of the drawing translation and process of fabrication and assembly as I was expecting a lot of mistakes to be made and learnt from during the assignment. The images included are probably the best examples from the class.
Vinyard Residence (John Wardle Architects) Richard Waterson + Ryan Tubby
Overall I was extremely impressed with the work of the students for this assignment, with many submissions containing a huge amount of detail that I wasn’t expecting to be included. It creates a very interesting platform for me next year when I return to utas to teach a similar unit with a focus on fabrication, this time in rhino.
Last month I headed up to sydeny for the Biennale of Sydney. Between bridgette and myself we had 4 cameras and a video camera – slight overkill. In my defence it was really just my camera that i had use of, everything else was film. Ayways took me a month to upload these images, but it was really great to be back in sydney. A highlight was visiting the exhibition at cockatoo island, an amzing decommisioned naval base in the middle of Sydney harbour.
A group of former IaaC students have, in assiciation with the school, created a new on-line magazine called we have NO VISION. It is aimed to be a magazine that looks at current notions of architecutre and proposes them as a new vision for the future.
My first post, a vision of architectural research, discusses the current trends in practice based architectural research and proposees a mode in which is can break free of the more traditional ‘research through design’ model that we are currently experiencing.
