Here's the latest on the strucutral concept for the timber High-rise. Shown are two, twelve foot floor plates with a post-tensioned wood exoskeleton and double skin glazing for ventilation.
Hackers Explore 'New Cinema' /
Some hackers got together and decided to explore the process of filmaking by exploiting point-cloud technology to compose ideas in real-time. This could signal a new era of filmaking where narrative decisions are made in virtual space over reality. Regardless of my bias toward 'old-school' filmaking, this opens up some new territory for cinematographers and delivers some provoking results.
Let's just hope this doesn't lead to anymore Scanner-Darkly-Films.
Manufacturing Efficiency /
Fantastic look at the complexity and advanced design/production process of an F1 car. If you ever doubted that racing was a technology driven industry, this should change your mind.
Timber in the City Studio /
This semester of studies I am participating in a competition held by the ACSA called "Timber in the City." Tasked with designing a high-rise mixed used tower in Brooklyn, Red Hook specifically, we'll be exploring how to take Timber and other wood products well beyond their traditional capabilities.
This project will open up some creative options as structural timber in high-rise applications is still very young and looked with much skepticism Thanks to modern fabrication technology however, there should be an opportunity to either extend the performance of existing systems or develop an entirely new system to meet the design needs.
So far, we've embarked on the task of exploring the properties and origins of wood species, modern timber systems, looking at fabrication techniques and analyzing the small set of precedent buildings using timber in high-rise construction.
New products like CLT (cross laminated timber) and post-tensioned timber seem to be the most promising so far. Combined with 5-axis CNC routing or robotic assembly, this should be possible to produce in small runs with low overhead, opening up the possibility for the industrial space requirements in the competition to become a wood fabrication studio.
Overall, the project is very promising and the studio is excited about getting start on schematic design following our site research presentation next week.
Parametric Wood | Daniel Widlowski | Archinect /
Building on the potential of parametric design, this project by Daniel Widlowski works with wood to translate input criteria into usable form. Often overshadowed by metal, plastic and concrete, wood is a great building product that is sustainably harvested and removes carbon dioxide from the environment