Jeffrey Sipprell

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October 7, 2005

Beginnings of a Manifold

This marks the first post in what will potentially be a really thought provoking body of research into the fabrication of plastic manifolds. Working again with Jason Payne, who was my studio professor in the Summer, the class has been assembled into groups and asked to examine the drawings of Arthur Harry Church. Our group has chosen the Heterotoma for further analysis and investigation, a flower which looks quite simple in its formal structure, but contains some very elegant multilayered conditions in the area where the petal, receptacle and reproductive center of the flower come together - creating various gradients of friction, compression and tension. We'll be working these things through drawings for the next week, with an eye towards fabrication, but ultimately the crux of the course will center around the physical processes of milling and vacuum forming. As I have yet to do either of these here at UCLA yet, it's very exciting. Now I just have to decide if I can swing the Hawaii trip from a financial and time standpoint.

From the syllabus:

The course extends the accelerating discourse on conceptual and material plasticity in contemporary design. The recent renewal of interest in plastics for construction in both industry and academia couple with evolving methods for its fabrication produce a growing need for new techniques in plastic formation and assembly. Historically, plastic components in buildings have been just that: components, or sub-systems meant to operate within larger, primary systems. Relatively flat panels and sheets confined within larger frames are symptomatic of this way of conceptualizing architectural plastic. Increasingly, however, the allied opportunities of thickness, volume, and mass in plastic have moved the state of the art toward the formation of bodies and manifolds.

That being said, plastic still comes in sheets. The problem, then, involves the development of assemblies of multiple surfaces that do not resolve into panelized systems. We will approach this problem at the moment of interface between surfaces at the detail scale. We will work with the hypothesis that architectural tectonics contain inadequate and misleading logics for the interconnection of plastic surfaces. Instead, mechanisms found in the vegetative realm will be examined, dissected, and transformed into tectonic conditions more attuned to the material dynamics of an expanded plasticity.

Posted by jsipprell at October 7, 2005 5:55 PM

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