Architectonic Summer

I was so excited and/or bored to get back to school that I signed up for the grad school summer intensive program for people coming in from non architectural backgrounds. It was a 3 week program that was to get us ready for normal school From 9-5+ everyday we worked on a block of wood.


At the end of the first day they gave us 3 blocks of wood 5x5x10 inches, and a 2 page chapter from the book "Invisible Cities". We were to cut a block the blocks of wood on monday and use3 the story as inspiration. One book was to focus on parrallel cuts, another on perpendicular and the last on the opposite of the first 2. Of my 3 blocks, by far the most popular was the "Camel Boat".


At the end of the 3rd day we began transforming our blocks into paper drawings. Here my main focus was in seeing how the jagged lines of my cuts worked with curving lines.


Mid way through the class we had a review of our project to date. This blocks was a trafsformation from the initial wood blocks and is my favorite drawing of the summer.


Once we got to the second half we focused on learning how to use the schools laser cutter and to once again transform our blocks, but this time using very thin plywood instead of the thick wood blocks. These were a couple of sketches on how to turn the solid sqaure columns into something made out of a thin material.


Ultimately I divided the block into layers and separated them using piece of the original layer. Basically cutting my mid term block into sections and forming a block from the sections. Above is a perspective view of the block with the layer transparency building up.


Here is a render of my computer model with lots of shadows.


The final plywood model.