Katerina Inepologlou / Diego López Ibarra
TASK
The mission was to design and 3d print a Lego Brick starting from a base model. The design should respect the four corners of the base, and keep the possitive and negative pair of lego’s cylinders. The dimensios of the base model were 65 mm x 65 mm x 130 mm. The design should also take advance of the 3d-printer materialization possibilities, and it should be inspired in an previous investigation we had about some examples of designed objects or buildings that have a structure as a skin.
DESING PHASE
A similar pattern was found in two of the “structure as form” case-studies. The Eden Project (by Nicholas Grimshaw) and the China’s Olympic Swimming Pool (by Herzog & De Meuron) present a structural grid that is sharp-edged and organic at the same time, shaping the buildings itselves. This generative logic motivated the design of the Lego Brick.
MODELING PHASE
Some points were set randomly on a Rhino file in order to create a Vornoid Diagram that could remind the skin of those buildings. The Vornoid Diagram was made and it´s points were copied and slightly moved randomly, to create another Vornoid Diagram, not too much different from the original one. These Vornoid Diagrams were set as the larger faces of the Lego Brick and were offset generating inner separated irregular figures. After finishing it, the similar figures from both Diagrams were conected using the command “loft” and, because those figures have the same amount of sides but with a slightly difference of rotation and lenght, the walls generated inside of the brick have double curvature. This 3 mm thickness planes would support and shape the Lego Brick’s body, as well as generating a dynamic and complex extruded grid able of taking advance of the 3D Printer’s materialization posibilities. A couple of pipes were added at the top of the brick and two cylindric hollows (using boolean cylinders) were sustracted in order to finnish the Lego’s essence.
3D PRINTING PHASE
We saw on the printer screen where exactly the brick was buried into the “dust” so we started removing the exterior dust carefully with a brush, until the actual solid brick appeared. Then, we moved to the air-machine and tried to remove the rest of the “hidden” dust. When the brick was actually clean we spread a liquid spray on it (made of water and salt) to make it more stable and resistant. Almost two hours later our brick was ready to be combined and joined with the rest of our classmates.
FINAL RESULT
DESIGNERS’ CRITIC
The curvature of the inner walls of the brick are not so notorious because the two vornoids diagrams were not too much different. At firts sight it seems like a single diagram extruded. Another relevant point was that because of the ignorance that we had about the 3D printing possibilities, the diagrams were relatively big to what we had in mind. We wanted to make it more dense but we were afraid of creating a fragile brick. Now we know we can 3d-print thinner and more saturaded compositions.