Wire Bender - The Pains and Progress

Its been a personal hell, and i have yet to finished what i sought out to do.....
after 3 weeks of custom parts, and electrical drawings and learning,
Here's a tease of what i've been working on lately.

My Wire bender based off of Pensa's DI-WIRE

when its finished i'll show the final picture of what it looks like and hopefully an image of the products it can produce...

oi..until then.

and yes, I do all my work on that little laptop. :D

Building on failure.

     As you can assume from what my title says, I have failed to produce a working prototype. Due to problems with the wood I bought off of craigslist and well my overly optimistic mindset :p What happened here? I realized after the fact that I was not so much fighting with the wood but with the glue that binds it together....So cracks broke out in the middle of the surface eventually causing the joint to break as well. I also have to rethink the joint....obviously the nuts and bolts are just a stand in for a clean post screw. A new design might work with laminating two 1/16 veneer sheets together but i'll have to test that next time i'm back with design fugitives.

Single component - Broken components not shown

     So coming back to LA with thoughts on how to bend ply wood I quickly applied a my revised thoughts (starting simple) to a case study for school. Here I took 1/8 veneer with all the wood grain going the same direction (of course by itself was very flimsy and weak). So this time around I went with laminating it with a vacuum bag removing the issues with the glue. Believe it or not, this 1/8" inch veneer can bend further than the previous 1/8" I had bought off of craigslist....so understand your laminated woods....

O_14 tower: Jesse Reiser

     The end resulted in a very strong surface, of course it is not a closed shape...so its weak in one direction (close it and you should be good). Otherwise its exactly what I would have needed to build my prototype months ago....


Key things I've learned from this:
     1: Its harder to bend plywood then just making it.
     2: 5ply will crack less then 3 ply due to large differences in core thickness.
     3: Vacuum bags works on dynamic surfaces. (go buy one)
     4: And Perfect Grayish white paint is hard to get....

A-Periodics to A-Tile

Further development lead me to push a small[2] set of tiles to grow and form something new. As you can see the system creates spheres in space, but what i'm truly interested in was the connections created between the spheres. (The entire thing has a nice transformer aesthetic too!!.)

A-Tile:

Thoughts:
When I started this project I was interested in Aperiodic tiling, but trying to stay away from whats been done I started to push a different way to connect tiles (mock ups hopefully this break!) and a strategy to make this entire system structural. Understanding that load is obviously a factor, the entire system has been revamped to have clean/ clear connections, the system normally wants to connect at what seems like 90 to 45 degree angles which causes a lot of issues not only in connecting pieces to one another but from my miniature models structural problems with load. Of course this is all speculation, but after manipulating the model for weeks I refined it to a point where my components when joined [4] could hold up more than 20lbs. This is looking good....now lets hope a 1 to 1 scale mock up is easy to bend....

Transition Moment:

Atmospheres: there are 3 types of interior spaces.

If your interested in more images of the overall/details of the project feel free to click on the images, they will take you to my Flickr account!

A-periodics v1.

Hey all, its been awhile since I last updated you on my thoughts...sorry life has been busy.

Anyway here is an example of A-periodic Tiling/Packing. I'll be honest, I was seduced/introduced to this type of tiling while working with Marc Fornes & THEVERYMANY. Sadly for me I was never given the opportunity to work on any projects related to these tiles....well until now.

"Let me first say I do my best not to copy what he's done...but after testing this tiling out i've found it hard to define my own "unique" tile. he's done too many different types...SO I started testing different types of orientation/configuration of the tiles inside and what geometry one tile consist of. One difference is that I don't quite need all the left handled tiles....we'll talk about after I finish my new sets of prototypes!"

Project 3 at UCLA: Bending space.


Cluster *clean connections...but only for one set so far...



Cluster4

What does this mean? well...this is about research/development and not about experience....yet hinting about experience these pockets contain a good opportunity for people to start occupying different types of spaces.

[Next developments I still need to update you on are Voxels/Recursive logic and twisted grids.! oh my!]

[Uniform]Tessellation_v1.2

...So finally a continuation of what I started months ago. I've been sidetracked with moving and so forth so work has been a bit slow. Earlier in the month Nicholas Reiter invited me to help him with a competition, after talking with the team I found a chance to further explore the logic in how to make uniform or at least controlled...tessellation on dynamic surfaces.. Over all..I failed...


Aqua:skin | Lines: Guidelines | White: Structure
"If you look closely you notice that the pattern is consistent overall. (not perfect.)"



The problem lies in when surfaces pinch or tighten, I have yet to spend the time needed to develop a way to reduce or add the amount of tessellation needed to populate the surface as it changes in width...

Tiling Patterning.

heres a start to what may be something interesting, well I hope... I've taken a break from Tessellation...to get some "real" work down. This is to start the conversation about what to do with the Subway stations in New York. A documentation of the logic behind the design and a way for me to compile the process of how it came to be.

This Tiling of course is one of many different renovation, preservation, and accentuations on the project.

John, Luca and I have been talking a lot about Preservation and Acknowledging the beauty of the subway stations, but how do we achieve not only spreading awareness on the materials and design of the subway station but further push the design for the future with out throwing away the roots that makes the station what it is.

As this starts to develop further i'll fill you in what the thoughts behind this are, until then!

PS: the color is just a way to start thinking about not only pattern but dept.

heres a link to the subseries

[Uniform]Tessellation_v1.1

So here we have it, Uniform divisions on a dynamic surface. With these wires I should no longer fear deformed/stretched components. Something I struggled with in my last surface tessellation scripts. Of course what you see here is...more or less wires with no components, this is how I personally subdivide surfaces.

[There are many ways to subdivide a surface. one way is to break it up with points evaluating the nurb* surface with a loop, another way is what i'm testing now breaking up a surface with wires, divide for points and then afterwards tessellating it. In my mind I feel this helps increase my chances of controlling the shape/size of my components.]

Next time I'll populate the surface for you, even though this is horribly over done I'm happy to have figured my own way of creating this. In the beginning, we all recreate the wheel at one point in our lives. Its what we do afterwards that sets us apart. Too next time!