projects /
Complex Corrugation

this is my thesis project from the California College of the Arts. Subtitled "A built inquiry into the role of risk and materiality in digital design" it was completed under the direction of Andrew Kudless, Neil Schwatz, and Geneviève L'Heureux.

In Strange Harvest Sam Jacob notes a familiar trope that bears repeating: Design is a language of whose building blocks are how things are made what they are made out of as much as what they look like. Encoded within these choices are cultural attitudes and ideas to the mechanisms that shape society: to technology and its implications.

This thesis takes this notion as a point of departure and places it at the intersection of two contemporary issues in design discourse: The increasing access and adoption of digital tools of production (photoshop, cnc, html) by non-professionals, and the trend towards the integration of design and making as two parts of the same coin - a feedback system that loops a virtuous circle around efficiency, productivity, creativity and material sensitivity.

Within the discourse of contemporary architecture, "Digital Fabrication and design" often references techniques and technologies of aerospace, automotive, and marine industries as examples of how we might bring about mass customization and complete differentiation into the field of architecture.

One of the current problems with this direction is related to the ways that these tendencies relate to labor and production. Indeed, while these externalizing tendencies shift the location of craft, skill and involvement in material processes closer to the acts of design, there is a corresponding increase in the distance and mechanisms of mediation between design and the object produced. In short, construction becomes procedural rather than instructional.

I wanted to test an alternate direction. Through this project I am looking to propose a method of working where the role of digital processes, design and production are defined by the characteristics of intimacy, engagement, and specificity and thus become inseparable.

The intimate relationship between digital work and physical space is connected by the act of making. How we make things is a reflection of our attitudes about materials, technology, and labor. New technology influences our approaches to design and production, promising in turn predictions of precision and certainty in the eventual outcome. Both the modernist kit of parts and the post-modern fascination with text and image imply an erasure of the process of making. These attitudes distance the production of architecture as distinct from design, alienating the designer from the contractor and structuring the project in the design-bid-build sequence, putting both literal and metaphorical distance between the acts of conception and execution.

This project seeks to find a balance between material systems, their configuration, and the inhabitants of the space. This means that the roles of material and production methods are brought in as active participants in the design research, both in the formative production of the project and in the final materialization. This question suggests a way of working that folds design and making in on themselves as simultaneous acts. That a design might be approached in a way that acknowledges that one is always making, and that the interplay between physical and digital modes of making is essential to a productive understanding of the potential of a proposition.

The result of this test is this pavilion. It is located in a site where people are actively engaged in design and making (mfa students). It is sponsored by the studios, and built by the studios. Client, tenant, and contractor are all blurred. Program likewise: open ended and porous, it accommodates classes, projects, parties and smoke breaks. It is both the site of individual projects and collective celebrations.

The material, form and construction processes are based on a limited set of operations, all accessible in-house.

Each piece of aluminum and part is cut from the sheet using laser cut templates and a flush-trim router. Thus the laser cutter is extended beyond its material limitation, and the material is both cnc and hand made.

There are two types of bends made to the aluminum: A global elastic deformation of the whole sheet and a local plastic deformation of the tabs. The tabs are sized to the dimension of the bending tool and the rivet gun.

The tabs are an open ended system of engagement. With a pair of holes in each tab, they allow for the dual functions of alignment and attachment. They are the nodes that stitch each individual act of bending and joining into the larger system of the pavilion.