Jeffrey Sipprell

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October 15, 2005

More Minimal Surfaces!

The study of minimal surfaces continues with my old friend from the summer, starfish 2. Rather than a purely technical exercise in development, packing and aggregation, this quarter promises a more rigorous analysis into how these things can become architectural. It's a hell of a lot of work since these things require some serious geometric development and manipulation, but I'm interested in pushing the research with some of the skepticism that came from the summer.

The first week, outside of getting everyone on board with these things, has focused on different degrees of transformation to achieve a combination of sidedness, volumetric hierarchy, gradient porosity and/or singular figuration. For example, a first degree of transformation would be to change the way the surfaces are packed, or to change whether they are made from curves edges or straight edges. These studies unto themselves do not illicit any of the above qualities, but when combined in second and third order transformations (hybridizations of the first), some very interesting formal and spatial qualities begin to emerge.

The image links at the bottom represent our most successful third order study which looks at two types of mirroring and rotating (facial and edge) coupled with a systematic manipulation of edge conditions (boundary and curve) to produce a form that begins to achieve the above 4 qualities to various degrees. David agreed that it was pretty successful and we've been assigned the task of 3D printing it this weekend.

Of course concurrent to that venture, we now have to begin studying coral and sponges as a way to exploit the erosion of modularity and the evocation of the figure. This will be done through four general lenses of examination - scale, color, sensibility and performance. I'll post some images shortly of the object or objects my partner and I are going to pursue for study.

Elevational Axon 1
Elevational Axon 2
Sectional Axon
Elevation 1
Elevation 2

Posted by jsipprell at October 15, 2005 2:30 PM

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