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.





