Friday, October 9, 2009

Spaghetti, wire, dowels, string and what next?


Thurs 8th Oct: We held a briefing for the next stage which is to explore some real model making. This was first tried as a 2-day exercise in 2004 with Mario Cucinella, using spaghetti for the structures and tomatoes for the loads - very Italian!

This year, we are doing it over a week, and asking them not to be excessive in height but to excel in level of research, experiment and analysis - using a material of their choice - straws, garden wire, cocktail sticks, ballpoint pens, dowels, spaghetti, Bucky Balls, A4 paper. The object is to explore concepts of stiffness and flexibility, bracing, stability, efficiency. We also hope some will explore tensegrity, and suspended structures (such as Antoni Gaudi's chain structures).
Illustration from the 2004 exercise.

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