Newsletter of the College of Architecture at Texas A&M University
"Spulenkorb," a coiled, plaited theoretical structure designed by a Texas A&M architecture professor and two of his former students, recently garnered honorable mention in an international digital fabrication competition.
Created by Gabriel Esquivel, assistant professor of architecture, Ryan Collier ’10, a Master of Architecture graduate, and Michael Tomaso ’10, a Bachelor of Science in Visualization graduate, the design was recognized in REPEAT, a competition sponsored by Tex-Fab, a digital fabrication alliance.
The competition organizers asked participants to submit entries that challenge the current exploration of parametric design with a meaningful synthesis of repetition and variation.
The Texas A&M team's design will be exhibited with other winning entries at Tex-Fab's February 2011 conference at the University of Houston's Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture.
The Aggie design combined coiled and plaited weaving techniques to give it stability. Translated from German, Spulenkorbliterally means a coiled or spiral-form basket.
While created with sensitivity to architectural logic and elegance in structure and form, the designers said the coil-spiral-weaving technique utilized in their design suggests movement — a propelling force that makes things operate and a pattern and specific geometries referential to physics, chemistry, and even music and film.
Spulenkorb employs a series of six continuous ribbons of various lengths, but none of the ribbons are straight and they all vary in width. According to the designers, the variables were determined by the geometry and the algorithm, as well as the parametric variables provided within the algorithm. Each ribbon includes several hundred developable surfaces, all with a unique four-sided condition.
To create the design, the team called upon recently developed computational algorithms using TopMod(3), a topological manifold mesh modeling software.
See Spulenkorb project overview (94K PDF).
- Posted: Nov. 18, 2010 -
Contact: Phillip Rollfing, prollfing@archone.tamu.edu or 979.458.0442.
