Wednesday 28th - London Trip

The two architecture exhibitions we looked at were held at the Design Museum and the V&A. I personally liked the style of the models using much more traditional mediums made from card or wood, usually cleverly incorporating areas of brass etching or lazer cut acrylic to draw attention to a particular detail or area.

The other room at the design museum showed future systems - ideas for a greener way of living and new iconic buildings. These ideas included an eco conferencing centre and a capsule home with prominent features such as solar panels and white, clean spaces featuring throughout. The materials used were appropriate to the new age, blue sky thinking feel behind these buildings and often used vibrant neon colours to tie all the models together. Though they showed more organic forms, the main material used was clear acrylic and other man made plastics to give a shinier, more up to date finish.

Tuesday 27th

After a second discussion we have decided to just build our focal section of the bridge that will be spray painted in realistic colours. Judging by the size of the model we will be able to include lots of detail on the support beam and under structure to this section of walkway, which should be visible in the reflection from the backsprayed acrylic representing the water. One potential issue of making this section is that the cables coming out of the support beam will be cut off halfway in midair with no further walkway to support. This means we will have to ensure we attach them into the triangular points along the beam securely enough so that they are held in place at the correct angle.

We have trialed acrylic and matal wire for the railings around the base. Looking at what has been working we believe we need to purchase a thinner acrylic tube to heat bend for the curved sides of the walkway along with much finer acrylic rods for the curved railings.

Wednesday 22nd

We have started to construct the sketch model using chemiwood, MDf and card cutouts. Angel turned and and sanded the support beam from a MDF scrap and then marked and drilled in holes for the cabels to come out of. I made the rounded base for this out of three sections of chemiwood to show where the railings and changes in texture will be. I did this by tracing the correct shape and dimensions from the scaled drawings and using this as a template when bandsawing and finally sanding back the structure when all three sections were glued together. We have a few ideas how we will attatch the railings afterwards.

When starting to construct the bridge from card we encountered a few issues. The initial support beams underneth the walkway were too flimsey and not to the correct thickness to Angel took my template and then cut some MDF ones from this. Once I had stuck the scaled drawings of the walkway together and reproduced the shape in card, we could see just how long and big our proposed model would be wich would not fit the brief to stay within the size of a desk space once completly assembled.

Tuesday 21st

After a group tutorial with Paul we have confirmed the scale and level of detail that our model will show. One major queiry was how to stand up such a heavy and tall structure so we decided that a baseboard counterbalancing the slope of the suspension support would be best. This baseboard must be at minimum depth 300ml and made from a solid heavy block of material. We will be using back sprayed acrylic to represent the water and will need to sample dark blues and black to decide what we think looks best.

We could now start printing out the design plans to a scale 0f 1;50 on an A1 page. To do this, Paul had to convert the files into Rhiono and rescale them by drawing in dimension lines for an A1 piece of paper and re-scaling the sometimes lifesize drawings to the new dimensions. The scale for most was already 1:50 but for the drawings at different scales we would have to calculate the new measurements and adjust them accordingly first.

What happened on Monday, 20/10/09

My group has chosen the South Quay Swinging Bridge design, located in Canary Wharf, London to produce a 1;50 scale model section from. We will have Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday across eight weeks to realise this.

The first decision we reached was on the support structure, deciding it will need to be made of solid chemiwood to provide enough strength to suspend the walkway from. This section would also be rather difficult to cast as we have had limited experience with this medium and any mistakes would clearly show up, especially if we made it clear like how we inteneded most of the model to be. Our initial idea was that we could make the whole moving section of the bridge to this scale, with the walkway fading to reveal clear acrylic at the ends, with the focal point of the support mast in colour.

Looking at existing models, we decided we would use clear acrylic rod for the cables and laser cut the boards and rails from clear acrylic. Much of the design plans are readily available to us in different programs and at different scales so we will need to convert these appropriately into Adobe Illustrator before we can produce samples of the bridge on the laser cutter.