Carolina Tamayo | Looking Out Week 16

This is a wooden swing/ sculpture design was created by Veronica Martinez. It was crafted by Spanish sculptors and is made out of cerejeira wood and treated with Teka oil. The ergonomic curved shape makes this seat a comfortable and relaxing space to be in.  Additionally,  the leaf form was inspired by warm season of autumn.

Link: http://www.trendir.com/archives/006525.html

Assignment 4: Chandler Archbell & Brian Bollens

For our furniture piece, we designed a bunk system that was suspended from the northeast side of our bath house.  Due to this exposure, our bunkers woke up to a wonderful view of saco lake and Crawford Notch.  However, in the case that they did not want the sun to wake them up, or they just hated seeing nature from their own bed, we designed a shutter to close off the window.  In our connection detail, we focused on how the door meets the rest of the bed enclosure.  First of all, we designed to door to be flush with the wall when it was opened and closed, making the whole enclosure appear seamless to its inhabitant.  We also cut out a curve in the ceiling of the bunk that accentuated the door's movement.

We only mocked up the top corner of the bunk systems.  We used reclaimed particle board desktops because plywood is so overrated.  This is the door in its closed position.

Good morning Brian!

The door seamlessly meets the wall, while its movement is articulated by a simple curve.

After we made our first mock up, we realized that the door did not remain flush with the inner walls once it was moved to its closed position.  Because our seamless idea was only true half the time, we needed to further develop our joint.

I see the seam!

This was our new design.  It involved cutting a slight arch out of the side walls.  Our door got a 45º cut so that there was only one, seamless point of contact.

We did our research.  The ideal hinge was a Rockwell SOSS invisible hinge.  It becomes embedded into the wood, and it is perfectly flush with the wall when closed.

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.

Assignment 4 - Madhura & Charmaine

Initial Rhino render

For our furniture piece, we decided to make a unit of sheet material that would then be multiplied in various iterations to form a bigger structure. This structure would eventually become a cladding on the walls of the living space, and the protruding parts of the unit would become the structure that holds the mattresses. 

For this project, we explored how every unit could be connected to its adjoining unit.

We made a physical model to better understand the strength of this individual pieces at their weakest points i.e. where the form curves and has the most force put ton it, because of the mattresses and the people. We changed some of our geometry based on our observations from laser cutting the pieces in 1/16" basswood. [some of them broke at the curves because they were very thin at these points)

Aluminium bars go through the L-brackets, that make the angle stronger, to sustain the weight of the mattress and the person sleeping on it.

Once we had our Rhino file, we made three router paths. The first one was the 2-axis horizontal roughing to cut out the area that needed to be shaped as a curved surface. To get this curved surface, we made a 3-axis parallel finishing path. In the end, we made a profiling path to cut outside all the lines to get the desired pieces.

Looking Out: KSimps Week 5

Farg & Blanche, a design studio based in Sweden, has designed a unique new line of furniture using a technique called wood-tailoring, where heavy industrial sewing machines are used to bind thin pieces of wood together. 

Wood can often be associated as a softer material, either in it's relative carve-ability, or from finishing factors like sanding, or through form in curves. 

Farg & Blanche manage to create an optical illusion in their furniture design, which  features a soft and organic shape, mimicking the flow in the grain of wood, but requires a closer look to tell what material is actually utilized. 

Carolina Tamayo| Looking Out Week 1

I enjoy looking at interior designs, so one day I stumbled across an interesting website. The website is called Blossomstudio's interior design and furniture blog.  It is a website that focuses on sharing new and modern ways to decorate rooms like kitchens, bedrooms, bathrooms, offices, etc.

What caught my attention was the simple and minimalist look of the bedrooms. They are not so much rooms but pieces of furniture with many different functions. By just using light wood and a bit of color they were able to create a comfortable, pleasant, and inhabitable area on a limited amount of space.