Digital Fabrication – Exercise 3D Printing

Group 22: Gökhan Çatıkkaş, Juhi Patel, Sebastian Alvarado

The project consists of simple joints and their response to the stored energy inside the rods. Playful. The rods stay in form with the already stored energy and if you touch and release the energy it “explodes”.

The explosion does not make the installation irregular, but it makes it back to its ordinary geometric form. This explosion does not mean destruction and irregularity, it brings silence and order to the geometry.

The assignment was to build a tower, tall, freestanding, with no extra elements, using four 840x400mm 3mm thick Plywood sheets.

The initial thought process was to achieve height by eliminating vertical elements and reducing the amount of wastage of material. To create stabilitiy and variation a “RING MODULE” with 5 nodal points was designed which could be generated 2 on each board. The remaining material was designed to be the “DIAMOND CONNECTORS” connecting the horizontal rings. 

The concept was to discover the possibilities of the plywood, by testing the limits and methods in terms of flexibility and the effects of tension on the wood’s fibers. To be able to handle the circular tension, a locking mechanism was designed allowing the horizontal loops and vertical repetition of modules. Techniques such as soaking in water and letting the modules dry in their bent form helped us to reach the design objective.

MARIA CZAJCZYNSKA        HRIDAY SIDDHARTH        GOKHAN CATIKKAS

BENDING

FINAL BOARD

1/5 PIECES

1/5 RING

ASSEMBLY

The whole structure is assembled of equal triangular bending modules. The modules are using the orientation of the wood’s fibers to enable small radii. The bending’s direction is perpendicular to the fibers’ direction, which means that we are not working against the material and the whole structure gains rigidity. 

Another manipulation that we have incorporated are the vertical holes in each module- we have experimented with their distribution and length in different stages of the project in order to control the flexibility of each piece. There is a circular hole at the end of each “crack” to prevent them from spreading and breaking the geometry.

The levels are created by piling up 4 interlocked modules. The freestanding structure gained a tubal shape due to the vertical repetition.