ARCHITECTURAL DIGITAL TOOLS

Those days of paper and pencil are long gone, but we all knew this.  I wasn't required to pick up a pencil since my first year in Architecture school, and that was just a means of breaking us down, and filtering out the meek. Now in fourth year, we find our selves working strictly with digital tools such as; the 3D modelling prototype, and the laser cutter. With this you can see in a few years there will be no need to present projects on paper, just digital projections, or even holograms.  

The image above is a project done for one of my digital tools classes, created in AutoCad, 3DMax, and Rhino. It was then loaded into Ryerson University's new laser cutter (apart of the new digital fabrication lab) and then cut out of 3mm thick blue plexi-glass. The image is actually only a rendering of the final product. Believe me the final product did not look any different from this. The project was to create a lamp shade using only the laser cutter, and a Ikea lamp cord needed to me incorporated into the assembly.



This sequence of images are the process of another digital tools project requiring a group of students to create a interactive or reactive intervention using digital tools. We may have fell off the goal with this one a little, for the modules were designed using 3D software but was fabricated mostly by hand.

The only way to get the forms and the quantity that we desired was to create a form by hand and then place it in a vacuum former to duplicate it 120 times. These forms were then tied together then suspended under the third floor stairs .

The final product was interesting... to make it interactive, we wired lamps with red, blue, and green lights. This being assembled in December might of influenced our choice of colours. These lights are wired to sensors which are directed in three different directions; one below to the right of the atrium, one to the left, and one on the second floor. When ever one of these sensors detect movement that light comes on. I must admit, it was a whole lot of work and money for something that turned out to be  a piece of art.