Carter Nelson: Looking Out Week 08

This incredible tree house (Yellow Treehouse Restaurant) by Pacific Environments Architects Ltd. showcases wood as a sort of nest placed forty feet high on a redwood tree. The project is aesthetically intriguing and its articulation and utility of natural light and how that is filtered throughout the project I find to be particularly successful in this project.





See more HERE.

Assignment 4: Cy and Sam

 

Our joinery is a sliding ladder system that is a part of the bunk bed and storage enclosures. The bottom plane of the top bunk has a 0.25" deep groove and a profiled strip to allow the handles of the ladder to guide the sliding of the ladders. The top plane of the storage enclosure has grooves at 14" increments to fasten the ladders at different points for sturdiness. Overall we were striving for a joinery system that allows sliding as well as fastening.

Groove at the bottom of the top bunk to guide the sliding

First mock up. 

We messed up badly on this. We had forgotten to design according to the smallest bit size for the cnc (1/4") and milled the dimensions much smaller with a 1/4" bit. Also, we did not realize the mistake because one person make the design file and passed it onto the other person to set up the paths. When we really should have done it together. The results were disastrous and most of the joining work was done in woodshop which defeats the whole purpose of using the CNC. It served as a good lesson.

Assignment 4: Furniture Joint Horace & Keith

For our furniture piece we created a shelving unit that could be replicated to create an expansive wall of these shelving units. We didn't want to just create a box and as a result we came up with a design that allows shelves to be created without maintaining just a box shape. This shape also allows us to have the shelf unit turn around corners as demonstrated in the photo below.

In order for the units to join together we came up with joint that requires metal splines. This joint allows the shelf to be assembled really easy and as the site of the bathhouse pose the challenge of transportation of the materials as the site is relatively remote. Our design allows our shelving unit to be prefabricated and brought to the site and assembled on site therefore allow ease of transportation as it takes up minimal space.

Although ideally we would like our shelf to be constructed out of 3/4" thick plywood however our model was constructed with 1/2" thick plywood as the thicker wood would provide more structural strength however we noticed that even at 1/2" our shelf has a high strength to weight ratio as it can support Keith lying down on our shelving unit (as seen below) as well as the combined weight of me and Keith both sitting on the shelf.

Furniture Joint: Yasmeen and Danielle

We started off this project by looking at the many types and variations of furniture and furniture design, but soon discovered that a bed could only reside in the sleep areas, a table used in the community areas or a relaxing bench used primarily in the bathing areas. We sought to create something which could appear everywhere in our design and be functional in each place. So we designed a moveable screen where a singular person could alter the space/environment or multiple spaces using this screen to let in more or less light or have more or less privacy. This was at the beginning of the project however and as we continued to design, the separator was slowly taken out of our spaces. It is currently in the bathrooms in the bath house and in the bunk areas of the sleeping quarters - in order to keep the idea of this reappearing but functional element.  

The screen consists of many individual parts which together make a whole. There is the rectangular base which creates the screen and the round top which allows the rectangles to slide through a slit in the ceiling. 

Joint in Ceiling Connection

CNC Rhino 

Furniture in the shower area

Furniture

Assignment 4: FURNITURE JOINT

How can planes modify light? How do the corners of a frame alter the view out? The experience out? Do floating planes deteriorate the frame? Can floating planes break down visual interpretation and explore the experiential perception of space? How can we make planes float? How can we instill an idea with bunch of matter? How can we take a cloud and pin it down? How do we hold water?
As three dimensional rotations of planes, architectural systems of "plinth" "wall" and "canopy" allowed us explore the lit qualities of a structural system. A pattern of gap and overlap between two parallel concrete masonry unit walls varies to organize light by spread and intensity. These two qualities were evaluated in many study models, light studies, and eventually became a sculptural aspect of our final design for the Saco Lake Bathhouse. A "Cagian" method of letting the CMU walls fall into place was used to cement our desire for the inmaterial/ the ephemeral to play an integral role in determining the form. Using grasshopper to randomize points in a landscape, placing center-points and quickly iterating through scalar variables with the use of "sliders." This method of designing and evaluating moved beyond plinth, wall and canopy and was used to determine the location and rotation of "floating plywood planes": bunk beds and panelized screen walls. As we iterated through these wooden sculptures, we looked for thresholds, a geometry that invoked haptic potential and inconvenient spaces. The word attach usually holds a functionalist, positivist weight that we fought in the construction of our furniture joint. A simple half-lap construction, two steel plates slip into each other and allow for three dimensional,  90 degree rotations between plywood planes. The simplicity and modularity of the joint avoids the elitist curvature of contemporary architecture and injects references to the De Stijl. We chose to "paint" the birch plywood sheets with a varnish to celebrate the grain and the brilliance of this particular sheet material. The strength of our joint is largely reliant on steel's material properties, yet the half lap is already a convenient solution to the strength to weight ratio. 

Furniture Joint: Gary and Kelsey

Our furniture piece initially began as a plethora of ideas ranging from benches in our courtyard, to the dining table in the hearth, to adjustable pieces of furniture that would be spread throughout our design. The discussions relating to this furniture piece was challenging in the sense that we did not know where to place the furniture and what it would be in the design. We wanted this furniture to be multifunctional yet somewhat complex. However, in the end we realized it wasn't about making this "complex" joint but rather it was making it be part of the architecture. As a result we developed a sliding "screen" located in the pools.These screens could be placed both on and off season to provide proper heating as well as offering glare protection to the potential bathers. Complexity within simplicity.

Assignment 4: Garrett Rauck and Matt Porter

Our design for studio project 1b hinges on the utilization of the mudroom as a central, communal space for socialization between the hikers and bathers, catalyzing conversation and encouraging ethnographic discovery. At the center of the space sits a fire to provide warmth and attract conversation. Due to these conditions and the importance of the mudroom/fire, we chose to study our chimney as our furniture piece. Another concept we were exploring in the bath house project is the effect of parallax as it relates to circulation. This idea came through in the way we detailed our furniture.


Theoretically constructed of heavy timber, the chimney vertically penetrates the aluminum roofing to establish it's presence within the subterranean mudroom as well as along the trail above. Slats of timber are cut into trapezoidal shapes and then bowed to ultimately form a hollow truncated cone for steam ventilation (for our detail, we used MDF and CNC-ed the bow rather than physically bending it). As shown below, steel 'fins' are attach to either side of each slat, allowing each module to be attached using nut and bolt connection. The gap between modules originates from the decision that this chimney would be suspended above the fire by tension cables running to the circular concrete wall around the mudroom. The lines suggested by the tension cables, which radiate out from the chimney/fire, created a set of geometry for us along which we could articulate reveals on the chimney, across the aluminum roofing and down into the interior spaces as well. This articulation of detail beginsthe experience of parallax that we are trying to achieve, creating rhythm as you circulate around the chimney, through the mudroom, as well as around the mudroom. 

Assignment 4: Kris Li and Ana Mernik

We wanted to make a furniture piece that would explore something other than ergonomics. The bathhouse project has a lot of experiential qualities to it: the way that the colors and textures of the CMU block, wood, and concrete slabs connect physically but have different emotional responses in people; the reflective qualities of water and the lake; and the general way people approach this man-made thing after having been in the wilderness for days.

As a response, we made a lighting fixture. We placed it between the kitchen area and the living spaces, above the table. The shapes were to mirror the plan of our building - overlapping rectangles distinguishing between functions of the space. This wooden piece of furniture would do the same. The face looking towards the kitchen are would have stronger light while the sleeping quarters would receive low, diffused light. We would do this by manipulating the sides of the lighting fixture so the side towards the kitchen is wider and more open by manipulating the cloth covering so that the side towards the bedrooms is double-layered.

In addition, we were careful in constructing the joint between these sheets of wood. We again wanted the furniture to mirror the whole building, so we wanted some simplicity in the way the shapes overlap and connect. In our bathhouse, we have a wooden plinth, wooden walls, and a wooden canopy, but the facades are all held up by a concrete (plinth) or steel (walls and canopy) structure. We wanted to reflect this in the furniture so we hid the structure behind the cloth material.

We made prototypes for both the shape and construction of the fixture, to experiment with different sheet material, stability when increasing the size, and number and kid of rods needed. We found that some cloth material (as opposed to paper or plastic) would work best because of its flexibility and range in thread density. We also found that it was difficult to match rod sizes to drills available. We also explored bolting the fixture to the ceiling or suspending it.

Stay tuned for Wednesday's final review to see the final product!:)

Furniture Joint - Carolina & Alexa

Originally, our furniture design was meant to be a semi-transparent wall that served the function of being a threshold between the private spaces of the bunks. This wall was made by creating a solid vs. void contrast between the Concrete Masonry Unit (CMU) and the wood. The wood was to protrude from the mortar of the blocks and give a sense of continuity while still creating a contrast.

Our joint was a mortis and tenon joint where each vertical piece had the “female” part and the horizontal pieces had the “male” equivalent that was milled out.  The CNC milled out these joints with curved edges and although we know that it could have drilled holes in the edges, we decided that we wanted a cleaner look for our design and therefore went to woodshop to create the sharp edges for the joint. The joint was friction fit. 

Originally, we viewed this design as an elevation. But as our design developed, we decided to view it as a frame/section instead. 

Above is the plan view inspired by our joint for the slab wall shown below. ]