DIGITAL PROTOTYPING FOR ARCHITECTURE—-3DPrint

Team:Pilar Aguirre, Sinéad Kelly Nicholson & Qiao Liang

3DPrint Design 1 – Lamp

Concept

The voronoi diagram is one of those mathematical oddities, like fractals and fibonacci spirals, that turn up frequently in the natural world. We see similar patterns in turtle shells, and fields of drying mud and leaves.

In the veins of a leaf, large voronoi cells nest inside smaller ones,  even the cells between veins are deployed as voronoi tesselations.

We want to make a lamp that covered by a leaf,with voronoi cells.

Design

We use a line to atteact Vorinoi pattern.The closer they get to bottom of the lamp,the bigger voronoi cells they will be.And it will create dramatic light and shadow effect.

3DPrinting

We do a lot of testing for how to make a perfect lamp.Some of the testing focuses on the thickness of  lamp.Some of the testing focuses on how to reduce the supports while printing.

Result

We still have some supports left.We decide to keep them because they are necessary while printing and very difficult to remove,and most important, they are really cool and look like veins of the lamp.

3DPrint Design 2 – Joint

Concept

“Forms follow structurally efficient.”

Design

We use a plug-in for grasshopper called Ameba.Ameba is a topology optimization software tool.We can apply different loading and boundary conditions to the initial design domain. During the computational process by the software, the design domain will evolve, similar to an ameba, into various shapes, and eventually reach an organic form that is structurally efficient.

We create a tetrahedron to be our prototype of the joint.We set the support and the loads on the tetrahedron and let the Ameba calculate.After 200 times of calculation,it reduces the non-structurally efficient part of our model and generates the final form of our joint.

3DPrinting

Result

This is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia
developed at Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings,in 2018 by:
Students:Pilar Aguirre, Sinéad Kelly Nicholson & Qiao Liang
Faculty:Eduardo Chamorro Martin