The course will enable access to a film or a text the way one might enter an abandoned spaceship: as a faceted volume to be examined with a sense of slowness, attention and wonder.
Environment in Shapes of Fiction 02 : 'It is not a Place, It is a Feeling.'

This course examines fabrication techniques as potential activators of material systems. Working at the interface between fact and matter, computed geometry and machinic properties, we will develop material catalogues translating visible and invisible properties into variables of effect, behaviour, scale and articulation. We will use Rhinoceros, laser cutting, and CNC technologies to create a series of ‘data prototypes’ demonstrating possible design negotiations between the machine and the material.

Going beyond the scale of the standard model, this course focuses on developing a working understanding of fabrication through designing on the CNC for an actual scale. Throughout the term, students will be developing projects that address the design of installation pieces within the school, examining the relationship of material structures and physical resolution. The ‘Pending Structure’ should be beautiful and consider ideas of independence while respecting forms of integration – a measured ratio of directionality and belonging. The course will culminate with the fabrication of a final project at Hooke Park.

The course will investigate the articulation of building volumes through modelmaking, each study culminating in a model comprised of one or more carefully crafted, abstracted volumes cast in resin. The students should aim to integrate their studio projects; the proposals will be abstracted to their most essential motifs, and modelled as a constellation of pieces with a minimum of detail. This process of reduction is intended to communicate certain basic qualities purely through mass, choice of detail level, colour, opacity.

Using methods of painting, printing, lasercutting, folding, sticking, 3d Maxing, and cutting, deep paintings will manifest themselves physically out of an aggregation of digital paintings that are created at the beginning of the course. There will be a larger emphasis on the mapping of pixels to 3-dimensional surfaces and the relationship that form when you begin to layer, fold, interlace and pleat painted surfaces.

This is a roller-coaster journey from the inherently 3D of a perception based architecture, to its 2D representation and analysis, into a 3 or possibly 4D fragment. We will be working with the precise settings of visual perception and its manipulation throughout the centuries from anamorphic projections, to the vertical skewing of Disney’s castle. The course is twofold and aims to articulate a chosen example of a perception manipulative architecture through a set of planimetric drawings and finally, the design of a 3D printed object, able to translate and reverse articulate the 2D analysed mechanisms of perception and manipulation into a 3 or even 4D fragment.

The course continues the conceptual computational framework set out in the autumn by looking at Augmented Reality (AR) as another potential site of spatial investigation using real-time video-based input. This term students would use the Smartphone/Web-cam as the main hardware and Processing/Java as the main scripting software. The generative interaction between physical & virtual spatial entities would be developed to complement the students’ on-going unit projects.