Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Shigeru Ban's Arts Centre



















































Shigeru's design is a vast modular, hexagonal, latticed steel, wood structure and clad in a translucent fibreglass membrane that covers the entire Arts Centre complex.   

Exercise 1


















































For this exercise, we were ask to create a single aggregate (2'x2'x1') and populate it over a 80'x20' surface. The focus is primarily on the interconnection of the aggregate pieces, which create the whole. Much of the stimulation came from Japanese joinery, which exhibits an impressive array of tongue and groove systems. The Art of Japanese Joinery is an excellent book to reference for such systems.
The overall shape started out as a disk and for the most part stayed that way. The decision for using a circular shape was that it could rotate and interconnect with adjacent aggregate with a simple twist. Unfortunately, the rotation mechanism has not been successfully meet up to this point. The system allows all the disk to slide into each other successfully without any obstruction.  The system holds together on the vertical axis but needs improvement on the horizontal.