Author: mlahr

Ólafur Elíasson is a Danish sculptor and installation artist. Recently, he has been working with polygonal tiles. His work looks a lot like the tile tent!

 

Hi All. Team Tile Tent is trying to find a way to minimize the number of sheets we have to laser cut. I found a plug-in for Rhino that will automatically nest your objects in the most efficient way. It’s called RhinoNest (www.rhinonest.com), and you can get a free 30-day trial by clicking “download.” There are lots of really good forums, etc. to help figure it out too.

 

The form finding with anchor points and anchor springs that Ella and I had worked on has been causing some new planarity problems with the walls. The transition from parallel to floor to perpendicular to floor isn’t smooth enough. (Red=bad)

Alex was able to improve on our definition and smooth it out a little more. New form below.

Using the method discussed during our last class, Alex was able to resolve the bulk of our planarity issues in Grasshopper. The image below shows the test results with mostly green and yellow – success! Working on a new prototype to test it out.

Using an unroll script (courtesy of Ben Howes!), we were able to unroll a couple of our tiles to make a prototype. Making it made us realize a couple of hiccups that still need to be worked out. For example, the unroll causes the bottom plane to be broken apart, not all faces are planar, and we need to create some sort of numbering/labeling system to help us figure out what face gets attached to what face.

Here’s an unrolled tile:

Here’s the prototype:

Here’s a diagram showing of one of the planarity issues:

Found this table design today. By two architects, Aranda and Lasch, teaching at Columbia. Reminds me of what Team Tile Tent is doing!

 

Shapeways (www.shapeways.com) in Long Island City has amazing 3d printing. I visited on a class trip for my patterns class, and recommend checking their website out. You can print in tons of materials, and it’s pretty affordable. If you register with a .edu email, you get a discount!

I tried using Weaverbird to do some mesh modeling on one of my form ideas. Overall, I wouldn’t call it a great success. But it’s doing something!