Assignment 4 | Mark and Kirk

In our initial considerations for our furniture we focused on how it could act as a dynamic piece that connected spaces together. At first we thought the furniture might wind its way throughout all the programmatic elements in our baths and become a kind of vine off of which useful programmatic elements grow.

In the end we boiled down this connection and unity into having one function - we ended up choosing sleeping - that the furniture could unify, and went off from there. At first we focused on how the units would relate to each other in terms of privacy and screening. This led to an exploration of openings based on views, privacy, and air flow.

For our final prototype we mocked up a corner joint connection where the various planes of the sleeping unit come together.

In the fabrication of our module we tried to think of what the CNC router can and can't do. This is why in our connector pieces there is a kind of tabbing - it's the only way to get a ninety-degree fit while accounting for the rounded cut. We had two kinds of connector pieces: a ninety-degree joint, and a 45-degree joint.

We CNCed out of MDF because, frankly, it was cheaper than buying plywood. If we were to actually build our building and hence all of the bed units along with it, we would use a nice, light birch plywood. The one problem we ran into was that the connector pieces were not completely friction fit, so that in order to show the piece as "assembled" we had to put pieces of double-sided tape on each side of the connector. This speaks to the fact that if we were to fully build our unit it would have to have a very high level of craft to friction fit, and that it might be much more robust if the connection joints were also attached to the panels using hardware.