Brief of the exercise:
The exercise was to design a famous Panot hexagonal cement floor tile as designed by Gaudi in 1904.One of the particularity of this design was supposed to be the capacity to be inserted within a larger assembly and to create continuous patterns across several tiles.
The goal of the 3d printing exercise was to create a dynamic assembly of plastic rods that will be connected with each other using a 3d printed component. The resulting structure should take advantage of the properties of the materials and use that to create movement and interaction.
The initial idea was to cut the wood in strips and develope a three-dimensional structure by joining them, in order to minimize wastage and take advantage of the natural properties of plywood. The concept stems from native basket weaving techniques which can be used as a structural system to develope different kind of three-dimensional volumes. Firstly, we experimented the material properties for warping, bending, joining and twisting. We tried strips with different lenght, width and fiber directions to find the best performance of the structure. After assembling the main grid, we reinforced the tower with longer pieces gradually. We discovered that the joinery we designed gave the structure possiblity to grow in height by pulling it in the longitudinal axis, and the diameter was contracted. We could get the opposite effect of expansion of the diameter resulting in a shorter tower. The form has the flexibilty of changing the shape without any adverse effect on the structure.
