Refined models, bricks, and a table saw

It has been a busy and crazy week or so. I have been working almost constantly during my waking hours. Besides Studio I also had a large paper due for both my humanities class as well as Arch-100(Introduction to Architecture), along with a midterm in my math class.

I have to utilize all the time that I can before I enjoy a break for Thanksgiving. To try and do this I went to work on the cuts I will need for my final model. The biggest cut is the brick wall that is on my model. I have approximately 420 little 1/4"x1/4"x1/2" bricks. To get the uniform cuts that I would need I set up the table saw, last Friday, in a way that I could take a long piece of MDF that was already at the quarter by quarter dimensions and cut it down to size. To do this I fixed a block of wood to the fence of the saw so I could build up a lot of cuts at once. The process looked like this.

The saw is a SawStop brand saw. This company offers the very amazing safety feature that if anything that conducts electricity comes into contact with the blade while in operation the blade immediately stops spinning and drops. This does include contact with body parts. 

The reason why I bring this up is because I can give a first person testimony for the greatness of this feature. While I was working, a large amount of bricks built up so I stopped the blade to collect them. I have to wait for the blade to complete stop spinning for this to work. However, around the eighth time I went to do this I turned as someone called my name. After a quick conversation I turned to reach for the bricks not fully seeing the spinning blade. Well my thumb came into direct contact with the blade setting off the brake and saving my thumb. I truly am one of the lucky ones because for being such a powerful blade I received a cut that resembled something close to a paper cut. 

It almost is no longer visible. I took this Friday night about 5 hours after the cut had occurred.

Thanks to the brilliant minds at SawStop I just have a small cut on my thumb instead of no thumb at all.

Along with this story of the actual construction of the model I would like to include some more renderings of the refined proposed design as it is of today. 

Front Elevation

Front Perspective 

Side Elevation 

Side Perspective 

Back Elevation

Back Perspective 

Side Elevation

Side Perspective

Plan

Top Perspective 

Here are some shadow tests.

Stairs. Axonometric Stairs.

The Axonometric Stairs project was a little while back. It had its pros and cons. It was a pro that we learned how to do axonometric drawings so well but a con because there was such a lack in creativity. We had to pick a staircase that was either in our world famous S.R. Crown Hall or the slightly less world famous M.T.C.C. (McCormick Tribune Campus Center).  I picked the outdoor basement stairs of Crown Hall, mainly because they are close to my desk and it would be easy to take measurements if I had to while drafting. We not only had to draft the stairs but also the area around it that is apart of the stair space.

Here are the stairs that I chose. 

I felt that the stair space was the hallway that it leads into in the basement and the sidewalk above the stairs, as well as the stairs. 

Here is my Arches Paper of it.  

It was mostly my professor's choice to include the brick wall. This view is offered from high up in Crown Hall. The brick wall is translucent which was achieved through a simple variation in line weights. The hall on the left fades away as does the sidewalk above the stairs. 

Transitional Space: The final project of Studio I

I have reached the final project of Studio I(out of 10 studios). This project will run until the end of the semester in December, it is a project on Transitional Spaces, a very important aspect of buildings and spaces. Here is a rendering of my refined proposal that I will be presenting to my professor.

This is done on Google Sketchup and then rendered with a rendering software. It is a simple, single-colored model.

Our goal is meant to move from a mass to a plane. The plane must be 8 feet off of the ground. My mass is on the right of the model and the plane is on the left. We had to work with a kit of pieces at certain measurements and must use the whole kit even though we are aloud to cut the pieces. 

The Final Chair

Well, it took a lot to get here. We presented our mock-up chair and our professor was, for the most part, happy with it. However he did want to see that all important back. We then set that as our main goal for the final chair construction. We spent a very long night working on it(even though I left early seeing as I came down with stomach flu or food poisoning that night). The result was something rather interesting. It had a back but it wasn't the best chair created. We learned from that design that with the amount of cardboard we were given the angle of the cantilever and the angle of the back cannot come from a single sheet of cardboard. Our solution was to take our mock up and modify it as much as we could to give it the illusion of a back.

It the end it was worth it all. The reviewing professors liked it, well partially, for the most part. They did tell us that the idea behind it was perfect, which is good to hear for me. We really had to work with the fact that we had limited cardboard and a back could simply not be produced. So the chair looks, pretty much, the same as it always has.

It might not have been the best looking chair there, but I loved every second of making it and am proud to call it mine. 

Our chair with the MR10(along with our two models of it).

Here is our set up for our presentation