FreeFormFab

Workshop: Van Muziek tot Gevelpaneel

In de architectuur wordt veelvuldig gebruik gemaakt van gevelbekleding (lijnen, vormen, kleuren, textuur) om gebouwen eigenheid en uitstraling te geven. In de interieurvormgeving wordt deze strategie gebruikt om visueel aantrekkelijke verplaatsbare wanden, afscheidingen en sferen te maken. Digitale ontwerp- en productiemethoden maken dat door middel van customization een bijna eindeloos pakket aan mogelijkheden kan worden aangeboden. Maar ook qua input is alles mogelijk zolang bestanden maar geschikt kunnen worden gemaakt om ze te printen of te freezen.

Workshop

Om hiermee te experimenteren en om marktkansen te onderzoeken vindt 19 en 20 september 2009 een workshop plaats over het ontwerpen van gevelpanelen op basis van muzieksamples. De workshop is ontwikkeld door Rotterdamse Architect Sang Lee. De software is van de hand van Dieter VanDoren, Computer Programmeur en DJ eveneens uit Rotterdam. Het project wordt financieel ondersteund door het Stimuleringsfonds voor Architectuur. FreeFormFab neemt de organisatie van de workshop voor haar rekening en Wisent, producent en importeur van CNC Machines bereid gevonden om de workshop te faciliteren met machines en een locatie.

Coördinaten

Datums: zaterdag 19 en zondag 20 september van 10.00-17.00 uur
Kosten: studenten 25 Euro, bedrijven 50 Euro incl materialen, lunches, drinks.
Begeleiding: FreeFormFab, Harrie Stamps (Wisent), Sang Lee, Dieter VanDoren
Uiterste inschrijfdatum:  14 september (inschrijfformulier invullen, scannen en mailen.)

Locatie: Wisent Raamsdonksveer
Workshop inleiding en inschrijfformulier (pdf)

Just Print Buildings

In the nineties laser printers revolutionized graphic design. Now 3D-desktop printers are revolutionizing industrial design and the common business models. Next we will be printing buildings and revolutionize architecture.

D_shape technology makes it possible to 3D print 6 by 6 by 1m parts. These parts could either be shipped to the construction site or the entire building could be 3D printed on location. The parts made by D_shape resemble sandstone. They are comparable in strength to reinforced concrete and the ingredients are the binding material and any type of sand. The materials cost more than regular concrete but much less manpower is needed for construction. No scaffolding needs to be constructed so overall building cost should be lower than traditional building methods.

The system works with a rigging that is suspended over the buildable part. The system deposits the sand and then the inorganic binding ink. No water is necessary. Because the two components meet outside the nozzle, the machine does not clog up and can keep up its accuracy of 25 DPI. Enrico and D_Shape are currently talking to lots of construction & engineering companies and architects about their technology.

The technology would seem to be especially interesting for these architects. With D-Shape they could make previously impossible forms and indeed approach a building not as a place where planes intersect but much more organically. As with regular 3D printing methods a lot of forms can only be made in this way.

Interview with Enrico Dini of D_Shape

Source: Next Nature

Sabin+Jones: LabStudio

In 2007 Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones initiated LabStudio, a hybrid research and design unit based within the Institute for Medicine & Engineering, the School of Design and the Nonlinear Systems Organization at The University of Pennsylvania.

Within the Sabin+Jones LabStudio, architects, mathematicians, materials scientists and cell biologists are actively collaborating to develop, analyze and abstract dynamic, biological systems through the generation and design of new tools. These new approaches for modeling complexity and visualizing large datasets are subsequently applied to both architectural and biomedical research and design. The real and virtual world that LabStudio occupies has already offered radical new insights into generative and ecological design within architecture, and it is providing new ways of seeing and measuring how dynamic living systems are formed and operate during development and in disease.

Overall, the Mission of LabStudio is to produce new modes of thinking, working and creating in design and biomedicine through the modeling of dynamic, multi-dimensional systems with experiments in biology, applied mathematics, fabrication and material construction.

Source: Sabin+Jones

Workshop Advanced Architectural Structures

The architectural community has in recent years undergone a radical transformation in terms of the geometric forms being realised. Specifically, buildings with irregularly curved surface forms have begun to proliferate. This has been facilitated by enormous progress in the capability of CNC fabrication and design technologies. It has also been furthered by the endorsement of so many of the key contemporary architects such as Gehry, Foster or Hadid. The issue today is no longer can a design be built, but rather, which technique is best suited to realise the concept. 

Given the increasing interest in the utilisation of free-form building forms the Technical University Eindhoven is organising a workshop on the design of such advanced architectural structures. FreeFormFab is one of the partners in this yearly returning program together with TNO Industry, Rhinoceros and Kurvenbau.

The Program runs from 9 until 13 March 2009 at the Technical University Eindhoven. Part of the program is a series of workshops and a number of evening lectures that can be attended separately. Participants can be students, architects, designers, techno-starters and companies. Participants must be familiar with CAD programs. There will be a small admission fee. In most cases a small SenterNovem Innovation voucher is possible.

• Flyer (pdf)
• Program and registration

(Chicago Blob) More on Flickr

From Control to Design: Parametric / Algorithmic Architecture

Along with the new architectural freedoms offered by contemporary technologies come new questions. increasing importance has been given to the role of parametric design, a process based not on fixed metric quantities but on consistent relationships between objects, allowing changes in a single element to propagate corresponding changes throughout the system. In parallel, recent developments in algorithmic design processes have opened the way to scripting and other procedures that allow complex forms to be grown from simple iterative methods while preserving specified qualities.

If the parametric is a technique for the holistic control and manipulation of design objects at all scales from part to whole, the algorithmic is a method of generation, producing complex forms and structures based on simple component rules. The question today is how these related but distinct techniques - the parametric and the algorithmic - will affect design practice. Leading practitioners of parametric and algorithmic design will be invited to contribute research and projects that illustrate their view on the new possibilities offered by these new technologies, their similarities and their differences. Rather than a compilation of individual projects, the next Verb monograph presents the work of each author as an extended contribution, through research and projects, that reflects a particular attitude towards the potentials of parametric and algorithmic design today.

Source: Amazon

• From Control to Design: Parametric / Algorithmic Architecture
• Michael Meredith (Editor), Aranda-lasch (Editor), Mutsuro Sasaki (Editor) 
• Publisher: Actar (October 15, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 8496540790
• ISBN-13: 978-8496540798
• Order by Amazon

Three D: Graphic Spaces

Three D: Graphic Spaces highlights a current trend in international graphic design: more and more visual designers are staging their compositions as three-dimensional scenarios, in order to turn them into posters, magazine covers, web sites, and animated films. The result is a host of suggestive new pictorial worlds that range from playfully arranged still lifes to room-filling installations. Edited by Gerrit Terstiege, editor-in-chief of the European design magazine Form, and designed by the prizewinning German studio Pixelgarten, this book offers an inspiring look at the various modeling techniques and means of expression involved.

Three D: Graphic Spaces, edited by Gerrit Terstiege, includes a design-historical essay by Steven Heller, an interview of Stefan Sagmeister about his typographical installations and various interviews with graphic designers by Sophia Muckle.

• Three D: Graphic Spaces (Hardcover)
• Editor: Gerrit Terstiege 
• Publisher: Birkhauser Verlag AG (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3764387718
• ISBN-13: 978-3764387716
• Order by Amazon
• Also see We Make Money Not Art

Mutsuro Sasaki: Train Station Florence

in his collaboration with the architect Arata Isozaki on the 2002 design competition for a new train station for Florence, Italy, the Japanese structural engineer Mutsuro Sasaki reversed his traditional role. He started with what he calls the target values for stress and deformation loads, and then worked back to the final structure. Instead of taking a given form and optimizing its structural conditions based on calculated stress loads, Sasaki generated an otherwise unknowable form by applying those target values on individual components of the structure. Each application rippled through the structure until a definitive form emerged.

Source: Archecord    

(Rendering courtesy Arata Isozaki and Associates)

Spam Architecture

The images from the Spam Architecture series are generated by a computer program that accepts junk email as input. Various patterns, keywords and rhythms found in the text are translated into three-dimensional modeling gestures. Created by Alex Dragulescu.

Source: Architectradure

Contour Crafting: Just Print a House

Contour Crafting (CC) is a layered fabrication technology developed by Dr. Behrokh Khoshnevis of the University of Southern California. Contour Crafting technology has great potential for automating the construction of whole structures as well as sub-components. Using this process, a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning. The potential applications of this technology are far reaching including but not limited to applications in emergency, low-income, and commercial

Our research also addresses the application of Contour Crafting in building habitats on other planets. Contour Crafting will most probably be one of the very few feasible approaches for building structures on other planets, such as the Moon and Mars, which are being targeted for human colonization before the end of the new century.

Source: Contour Crafting 

Matthew Ritchie: The Evening Line

The Evening Line is the result of a three year collaboration between artist Matthew Ritchie, architects Benjamin Aranda et Chris Lasch and engineers at Arup AGU. It is both an autonomous and site-specific structure conceived for the Venice Biennial 2008 and a fragment of a much larger structure - potentially the size of the universe, through the application of fractal geometry: The Morning Line currently on view at the Contemporary Art Biennial of Seville. Both constructions are infinitely modular, they are built from a single shape called the bit that derives from a truncated tetrahedron.

Made of laser-cut aluminum modules, the architectural structure reflects Ritchie’s attempts to reflect the vastness of the universe. The Evening Line has no single way in or out, no beginning or end, no single narrative, only movements around multiple centers. Its modular units can increase or decrease around a fixed ratio, they can also expand or contract in any size or direction. See also this video in which Matthew Ritchie makes it almost crystal-clear.

The Evening Line is on view at the Arsenale, Venice Biennale until November 23rd, 2008.

Source: We make money not art

Digitally Fabricated House

Assistant Professor Larry Sass, director of the MIT Digital Design and Fabrication Group, was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York to design, fabricate and assemble the first entirely digitally fabricated house for their 2008 show, Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling. The exhibit features five full scale houses on the MoMA’s vacant exterior lot along with an interior exhibit which focuses on the history of factory-made and prefabricated housing throughout the world.

The design is a digital translation of the New Orleans’ style Shotgun House, complete with an ornamental front façade and a porch elevated off the ground on piers to allow flood-waters to rise and fall beneath the house. Every component of the house, from the structural members to the frieze ornamentation, was first digitally modeled and then CNC fabricated from plywood and plastic for a precise interlocking assembly.

Quick facts

• Entirely friction fit - no nails, screws or mechanical fasteners
• Composed of over 5,000 unique parts all fabricated on 2 CNC machines in 3 weeks
• 21 days for assembly by 3 people

Reviews and catalogue

• Brightcove
• Archpaper
• TED Blog
• Archecord
• Time blog
• Catalogue