Students Work with Industry Partner, Zahner Metals, and State-of-the-art Digital Technologies to Design/Fabricate/Build a Park Structure for the Muncie Community:

The reBarn project aims to enhance a public park along the White River in Muncie, Indiana. With the support of Muncie’s mayor and partnering with the local parks commission, students selected and researched the Westside Park site while developing design proposals. By providing a new semi-programmed platform for activity and reflection, users are connected to the landscape in a tactile and visual manner. Rejecting the over-simplified archetype of “bench” or “platform”, reBarn purposely anticipates many different programatic and ergonomic moments by engaging park users with a formal ambiguity. Without a predetermined and easily read use, users are invited to invent uses for sitting, reclining, climbing, etc. A sense of human scale and proportions is embedded in the layout of the panels, and its form is pulled specifically from the site as it creates a third levee above the river to encourage visitors to engage the structure.
reBarn is composed of reclaimed barnwood (275 unique pieces for a total of 300,000 board feet) donated to i.M.A.D.E by a local family. Each piece of barn wood was de-nailed and power washed, numbered and inventoried by species, length, width, depth, and other physical characteristics. This catalog of available stock was used to efficiently nest reBarn components which were unrolled from a digital Rhino model. Each wood component was custom milled using a 3-axis CNC router.
Connections between individual wood components and panels were informed by a partnership with Zahner Metals in Kansas City. Our students and a team from Zahner discussed this project very early in the process in order to effectively design and engineer reBarn according to the many fabrication and structural constraints. This collaboration included online meetings, phone calls, and a visit to Zahner’s headquarters in Kansas City. Zahner generously supplied materials and fabricated all of the aluminum components for reBarn including five water jet cut aluminum surface panels and over 350 variable aluminum joints.
After fabrication, reBarn was installed over seven days, including all site work and preparation. On-site, the digital model (loaded on laptops) was the only reference for placement of structural supports, resulting in precision assembly. In fact, digital design and fabrication technologies along with industry partnerships were instrumental in realizing the project.

i.M.A.D.E wishes to thank:
Mayor Sharon McShirley of Muncie and the Muncie Parks Department, particularly Doug Zook for their support of the project.
Bill Zahner, Tony Birchler, Roger Reed, Sam Miller, and the rest of the team at A. Zahner Metals for their collaborative help throughout the design process and their generous production and material support.
Ken and Karen Newton in Cambridge City, Indiana for their generous donation of the barn wood used for the project.
Stacey and Linda Burt in Eaton, Indiana for lending tools and equipment and donating site and landscape materials.
The College of Architecture and Planning’s wood shop staff–particularly the shop manager, Kyle Sechrest.

Design to Production Team:
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Jared Burt
Dustin Headley
Kyle Perry

Student Help Team:
Amber Agan
Rudy Arroyo
Ariel Aurellano
Deepak Baniya
Ben Fruehling
Ben Greenberg
Austin Lucari
Joseph Martin
Claire Matucheski
Brianna Newton
Priyanshu Shrivastava
Mark VandenAkker

Partners:
A. Zahner Metals
Muncie Parks Department

Faculty:
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion

Ball State University “speedwaystudio” designs addition scheme for the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum

INNOVATE :: In celebration of the centennial of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Ball State University graduate students in architecture accepted the challenge of exploring new ways of revealing the innovation, story, and heart of the Indianapolis 500 and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. As a part of the College of Architecture and Planning’s Master of Architecture degree program, a six-week architecture design studio project included proposing a hypothetical renovation and expansion of the existing Indianapolis Motor Speedway museum. The intentions were to spark a discussion about how architecture can align with the legacy of innovation inspired by the Speedway and display the incomparable collection of the Hall of Fame Museum.  To conclude the project, the students presented their team-based design scheme at IMS and presented the museum with a scaled model mounted in a digital designed and fabricated kiosk.

REVEAL :: The exterior of the designed addition celebrates the fabrication methodologies seen throughout the history of the automotive industry as the interior begins to reveal all aspects of racing history and innovation. The building, collection, and narrative of the brickyard’s incredible impact on our Hoosier heritage is gradually revealed as the visitor approaches and circulates through the space. Upon entering the museum, visitors are guided through two paths of exhibits in which cars are positioned, manipulated, and exploded to display an intimate level of detail. The goal of this new exhibit space is to provide a more in-depth experience taking you, the visitor, from the stands to the driver’s seat.

SPECIAL THANKS :: The Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hall of Fame Museum, particularly Ellen Bireley, Terry Gunter, and Mel Harder.

STUDENT TEAM :: Jared Burt, Majdi Felah, Matt Flamm, Eric Gerding, Mo Han, Madeline LaPlante, Adam Miller, Kevin McCurdy

FACULTY :: Kevin Klinger and Mahesh Senagala

EXTERNAL CRITICS :: Kevin Frank and Alexi Karavokiris [RTKL Associates, Chicago]; Matty Bennett and Bendan Fox [SEQUENCES DESIGN, Indianapolis]; Donna Sink [MWHarris, Indianapolis]; Harold Baker [Harold Baker Architects, Brazil, IN]; Torrey Dawley [Sandpaper Studio, Indianapolis]; David Russick [Indianapolis Museum of Art]

Indianapolis Star Article: here.

After the shortlist of finalists were announced, the team presented to a jury for final round of judging. Final results from this jury will be announced on May 20.

More info here (Ball State University press release): http://www.bsu.edu/news/article/0,1370,7273-850-63996,00.html

The Institute for Digital Fabrication at Ball State University are testing ecological design strategies for the building industry following a generous Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Award. The research uses a digital database of component pieces from available scrap material, digitally catalogs waste products from the building industry specifically the Indiana Limestone industry and develops computational means to apply the cataloged information to parametric design models. Taking scanning technology mostly reserved for the auto and industrial design industries and deploying a portable system outdoors allows the recording of heavy stone scrap objects into a digital coordinate space. The idea of the project embraces irregularity rather than the regularity that is traditionally used in most refined stone design work. Since each recorded stone in unique in size the two dimensional composition of pieces form an overall irregularity organized wall. The constant and measurable depth of each scrap piece allows for a recognizable three dimensional organization to emerge.

While digital technologies have improved the flow of digital information from designer to fabricator, this system, entitled ‘SmartScrap’, is unique because it improves the flow of information from the fabrication process back to initial design decision-making. Completion this digital information ‘feedback loop’ will seamlessly inform design and fabrication decision making based on available sizes, shapes, and quantities of leftover/waste stone inventories.

Student Team:
Ben Greenberg
Greg Hittler
Kyle Perry

Partners:
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Indiana Limestone Fabricators

Faculty:
Jason de Boer
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion

Developed by students from “An Inconvenient Studio”, MorphoLuminescence utilizes an understanding of fashion photography to find its form and provide optimized lighting, enhancing the experience of trying on clothing.  A three-point lighting set up is commonly used by fashion photographers, arranging a bright key light above eye level, in combination with softer fill and back lighting to create subtle shadows and a three dimensional effect.

Comprised of custom laser-cut “petals”, “stems”, and hinges, Morpholuminescence was pre-assembled for testing prior to shipping in pieces to the SPOT ON SCHOOLS exhibition in Florence, Italy. MorphoLuminescence provides variably tuned hue and light intensity levels in order to affect the fitting room experience and adapts its form to accommodate changes in the space.  In its idle state the dimly lit surface of petals hangs free, signaling to consumers that it is ready for use.  Through simple infrared sensors, human presence and variations in the space are analyzed, initiating its state of change.  Differences in height are read by the sensors and interpreted by two Arduino microprocessors which drive servo-motors, in order to actuate the surface.  MorphoLuminescence amplifies the experience of the individual by expanding and contracting, recognizing when a user is bending over or reaching up to remove clothing, only arriving at its state of pose when the consumer is ready.  In this final state, each panel of the surface is backlit with an individual light source. Relative to the ratios of the three-point lighting set up, more illumination occurs where the density of panels increases.  MorphoLuminescence focuses on efficient, optimized lighting for the individual, as well as physically amplifying the experience of change in a fitting room.

Morpholuminescence will be shown at the BEYOND MEDIA festival in Florence, Italy in July.

Team:
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Kyle Perry

Faculty:
Mahesh Senagala
Joshua Vermillion

Partners:
The Morpholuminescence project was made possible by the generosity of the following industry partners:
Buente|Buente Architects, Capstone Real Estate, LHI Lighting Sales, Ridout Plastics, The Estopinal Group, and VPS Architecture

Process Photos

Arcus Animus is a kinetic mesh system designed by Waterloo Architecture/Philip Beesley Architect Inc., in collaboration with Ball State’s Inconvenient Studio/i.M.A.D.E (Senagala/Vermilion) and Pratt Institute Epithelium Studio (Beesley/Sarrach/Wang). Fabricated and installed in four days, the hanging, layered meshwork composed of impact-resistant acrylic, bamboo, and mylar components reacts to human occupation interpreted by arrayed proximity sensors. These physical reactions consist of “shaking” and “waving” movements actuated pneumatically using solenoid valves and custom air muscles, and controlled by Arduino microcontollers with processing-based code development.

Arcus Animus is a recent incarnation from a long lineage of mesh and actuator installations at Waterloo Architecture and Philip Beesley Architect Inc. from 2006-09. The custom air muscles and code cores were originally developed by Christian Joakim in 2007. A revised kinetic mesh and air-muscle system (which was the basis for this meshwork) was developed with the Pratt Epithelium Studio in 2008. This meshwork was redesigned at Waterloo Architecture and Philip Beesley Architect Inc. for Ball State in January 2009, with code redevelopment by Brad Rothenberg of Pratt Institute. The Ball State workshop entailed fabrication, assembly, and installation, along with further mesh and actuator details and code refinements throughout February 2009.

Ball State Installlation/Development Workshop:
Philip Beesley, University of Waterloo/PBAi
Brad Rothenberg, Pratt Institute
Mahesh Senegala, Ball State
Josh Vermillion, Ball State

Ball State Team:
Deepak Baniya
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Luke Christen
Brad Horn
Brandon Hoopingarner
Paul Konwinski
Yevgen Monakhov
Brianna Newton
Daisy Winkler

Pratt Institute:
Richard Sarrach
Evan Douglis

Waterloo Architecture/PBAi Design Team:
Rob Gorbet, Engineering Director
Hayley Isaacs
Manuel Kretzer
Yoshi Washi
Jane Wong
Eric Bury
with
Jon Gammell
Christian Joakim
Kirsten Robinson
 

Process Photos

i.M.A.D.E encourages design students to focus on the creation of unique prototypes based on material interrogations and market viability. Students are actively developing business plans and exploring commercial outlets for design prototypes based on emphasizing the production of ready-made, yet customizable products. Indiana has a long tradition of producing hardwood veneer from regionally harvested trees. Made of Indiana Hardwood veneer, the “Bodhi Tree” highlights some of the more subtle properties of hardwood. The thinness of veneer allows wood to bend, twist, and glow—revealing latent and innate qualities of thinly sliced wood. These qualities are exploited in projects that reveal the “light/lighter” qualities of this typically “heavy” material.

Using a hand-assembled notch/slip joint system, the “Bodhi Tree” was formed from self-similar laser cut veneer components with no hardware. The curvature and tension of twisting the veneer strengthened each unit to form a stable and resilient lattice. The overall assembly and geometry resulted from a self-organized form-finding experiment, which led to the creation of gradients of variegated densities, strengths, and geometries of light-catching surfaces. The resulting mesh was used to define space and filter light in an otherwise stark interior environment.

Faculty:
Steven Deters; Lecturer, UCLA +  Fall 2008 i.M.A.D.E Fellow
Kevin Klinger

Student Team:
Deepak Baniya
Elizabeth Boone
Eric Brockmeyer
Adam Buente
Dustin Headley
Kyle Perry
Priyanshu Shrivastava

Partners:
David R. Webb Company
Indiana Hardwood Lumbermen’s Association

i.M.A.D.E encourages design students to focus on the creation of unique prototypes based on material interrogations and market viability. Students are actively developing business plans and exploring commercial outlets for design prototypes based on emphasizing the production of ready-made, yet customizable products. Indiana has a long tradition of producing hardwood veneer from regionally harvested trees. Made of Indiana Hardwood veneer, “Luminaires” is one such pilot project with potential for commercial spin-out, as the project highlights some of the more subtle properties of hardwood. The thinness of veneer allows wood to bend, twist, and glow—revealing latent and innate qualities of thinly sliced wood. These qualities are exploited in projects that reveal the “light/lighter” qualities of this typically “heavy” material.

Described by a fully-parametric digital model, the shape and proportions of the “Luminaire” can be easily customized, with precision laser-cut veneer components. These components are coated in polyacrylic and assembled by hand using notching and slip joints. The detailing of the slip joints was inherent in the design development, such that no hardware is necessary, and anyone can assemble the final form. Once linked to a web interface, the product of the design can be uniquely customized by consumers and shipped flat-packed.

Student Designer:
Eric Brockmeyer

Various Student Production Teams:
Eric Laine (IHLA Showroom)
Mark VanderAkker (IHLA Showroom)
Ben Greenberg (Spot on Schools Exhibition)
Greg Hittler (Spot on Schools Exhibition)
Austin Lucari (Spot on Schools Exhibition)

Faculty:
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion

Partners:
David R. Webb Company
Indiana Hardwood Lumbermen’s Association

The Manufacturing Material Effects Exhibition, at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, framed and displayed the design and material production work of leading international designers and fabricators who participated in the Manufacturing Material Effect international symposium, and subsequent book release from Routledge Press. Designed, fabricated, and installed by a design studio working closely with industry partners from local wood, aluminum, limestone, and plastics industries, the exhibition closely examined collaborative design and production practices from around the globe based on innovative and experimental processes of material exploration.

Each component of the exhibition display system was custom designed and fabricated. A digitally-fabricated plywood armature system was developed and optimized for efficient nesting, fabrication, and shipping in order to minimize material waste. Rear-illuminated acrylic panels were vacuum formed over CNC-milled wood patterns in close collaboration with a local plastics manufacturer. All connections and joints were facilitated by custom designed and laser cut aluminum clips. Digital files were exchanged with local limestone industry partners for the 3 axis CNC production of stone bases. Full-scale mock-ups facilitated the choreography of the vacuum forming process and connection details.

In order to test lighting effects, the studio deployed a variety of methods—both, computationally, and physically. Entire armature bays were fabricated at full-scale with lighting and wiring in order to optimize the lighting design. Simultaneously, the studio simulated the overall lighting effects using photometric light renderings and false-color illuminance studies. This coupling of digital and physical outputs allowed students to understand the successes and failures in both the design and analysis techniques.

The exhibition project was assembled and installed by the student team, using a coding system for identifying each unique component. Additionally, an interactive, touch-screen informational kiosk was developed and installed by Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts. The design process was richly enhanced by actively engaging and participating with the manufacturing process, along with the vetting of design schemes by industry partners, which led to a design process that was truly informed by production, cost, and material considerations, and fostering an innovative collaborative relationship between design and making.

Student Team:
Amber Agan
Matt Amore
Elizabeth Boone
Adam Buente
Lena Dodson
Brandon Hoopingarner
Joe Intriago
Adam James
Kyle Perry
Ross Smith
Rob Thompson

Faculty:
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion

Partners:
Indianapolis Museum of Art
Institute for Digital Intermedia Arts
Arrowhead Plastic Engineering
Indiana Limestone Fabricators
Mid-West Metal Products
Indiana Hardwood Lumbermen’s Association
David R. Webb Company
Amos-Hill Associates
Ball State Digital Corps
Laird Plastics

Process Photos

The implication of ‘fabrication’ has rapidly expanded for architects, architectural researchers, and students engaging the latest digital tools: fabrication is both material and immaterial, pushing the limits of experimentation while working against the imperatives of real technology and construction imperatives as articulated by other scholars. Computer-aided design and manufacturing, once discreet applications of technology, are now part of a fluid process of designing, modeling, simulating, making, and re-making. This process is characterized as a “feedback loop”, where digital information meets critical decision-making and the design process plays out in the service of production, assembly, construction, and critical interpretation.

In this sense, fabrication is not simply a hermetic process, but an ecology that rewrites our assumptions of what to do with materials, information, and the ability to both control complexity and generate from computation. Constructing Information was a design course in which architecture students examined an environmental design problem by way of the digital feedback loop, where their efforts in applying digital design and fabrication methods were driven explicitly by material and site realities and where their work was executed, installed, and critically explored in situ. Their work raised important questions about how information and context overlay and merge, and the critical potential of visual, material, and spatial effects as part of a fabrication-oriented design problem.

In the context of a semester-long design project, students were asked to engage a design problem involving an environmental construct emphasizing the digital feedback loop as discussed above. The construct, at the schematic level, was intended to have some sort of internally directed, computational logic but was also intended to respond to a specific environmental condition and function. Over the course of the design exercise, it was this conceptual relationship within the feedback loop – between environmental effects and computational logic – that was a primary challenge in communicating ideas, designing analytically, and developing concept-integrated fabrication strategies.

Projects at the beginning of the course were authored by the seven individual students. The students were assigned on the first day of class the problem of creating a particular environmental construct, selected from the following list: wall cladding, curtain wall interior shading, suspended ceiling, privacy partition, interior passage point , skylight interior shading, overhead light diffusing screen, interior furnishing. Students were asked, in parallel with their initial schematic concept, to define the conditions of the design problem in terms of environmental effect: that is, what their object or system responded to (sunlight, artificial lighting, acoustics, ergonomics, experience, media, movement, touch, climate, or a combination). Throughout the first part of the course, computational design methods were introduced in a set of workshops, followed by a workshop presenting methods for environmental simulation related to the set of criteria mentioned above. Sites for the projects remained intentionally abstract, to allow students to narrow their conceptual focus on particular effects and relationships.

Throughout the first half of the semester, students continued to work individually through the following stages of the feedback loop, introducing their own imperatives and objectives as projects evolved. In parallel, topics and workshops were explored ranging in subjects such as visualization, rules-based and parametric design, environmental analysis, and fabrication. In the final stage of project development students assembled in two teams and were assigned to select a site, within or around the college’s building, in which to interrogate and install their designs. In the final stages of project development, project commonalities, strengths, and weaknesses became clear and the introduction of the projects to real-world fabrication constraints and sites made design revisions inevitable. In the spirit of the feedback loop and process-based working model, the students transitioned from seven individual projects to two project hybrids, where students collaborated in teams.

Perhaps a consequence of this collaboration based on process, the students elected to form a single ‘super team’ in the final weeks of the process. An important contributor to this decision was the availability of a large amount of usable material scraps from a previous project, which had resulted in each team working towards adopting similar material strategies. Weeks of looking at each other’s projects seemed to attract the students towards a common conclusion, with individual students in the end citing particular interests (scripting, solving construction details, studying material strategies) in contributing to the final process. This underscores the emphasis of the course towards design and fabrication process over a premeditated ‘object’; by way of the feedback loop, the focus on iterative development over end product encouraged integrative, collaborative problem solving over homogenized, individual expression.

Project Description
The final project occupies a small section of curtain wall windows in an elevated but public section of the architecture building. Overall, the students were able to identify many opportunities for experiencing the site from inside and outside, understanding its potential to shift with the movement of viewers through the space and their movement relative to the time of day. Relative to shifting times of day, solar geometry and daylighting could relate to project geometry as perceived during the daytime, while a projection system installed on the interior could illuminate the project after dusk. The geometry of the sun, sky, and projected light allows the project to respond to light and the movement of viewers continuously throughout the day.

An array of variably extruded and trimmed polygons establishes the project geometry, generated from a script that, provided with a simple volumetric boundary, first divides this volume into variegated cells. Through the script, each horizontal row of cells is extruded in response to a particular solar orientation, allowing the clear admittance of sunlight on key days and mixing sun and shadow while transitioning between these days. The randomized distortion of each cell, also part of the script, related to project’s intended effects relative to light and material.

The students intended to create ‘distortion’ of light and thus spatial effect, and early in the project it was recognized that neither flat planes of material or a regularized grill of cells could provide this distortion – in each case light was either washing the material surface completely or passing through the cells too completely. This reality was discovered when the chosen material – ‘milky’ white acrylic – was examined in projected light. This particular material reacted to light most intensely when its orientation was shifting – at the corners of geometries, and when the incidence of light could change (i.e. from grazing to direct) among adjacent surfaces. Distorting the cells through randomization and shifting their orientation within the array exposed more corners and surface variation to view, and could increase the spatial effect of the project. Scripting allowed the students to easily experiment with scaling cells, varying the orientation and extent of the cell array without rebuilding digital models and revising the intricate geometric relationships between site, solar geometry, and structure.

The acrylic used in the project was part of a usable volume of scrap material that the students found could be processed into smaller plates for in-house laser cutting. The production method for each cell involved unfolding from the model, nesting in cut sheets, and labeling. Finished parts were then organized and bent using printed templates and a single-element plastic heater. Scoring the acrylic involved creating a rasterized gradient at each seam, which could be processed by the laser cutter as a pattern of pulses which, in turn, could cut a precise, three-dimensional groove in the acrylic. The mounting detail used silicon rubber suction cups and clear acrylic tabs which snapped into each cell: a system which could be manufactured using the laser cutters, easily optimized with slight modifications to snap ‘teeth’, and allowed a loose fit when attached to glass to absorb remaining geometric discrepancies.

Working with real prototypes, understanding the capabilities for forming the material, and organizing the project around site conditions enabled these realizations in the design process – a direct manifestation of the feedback loop from design to fabrication.

Students:
Taf Bwititi
Kyle Perry
Adam James
Kevin McCurdy
Jorge Intriago
Nick Satterfield
Nick Respecki

Faculty:
Michael Gibson
Kevin Klinger
Joshua Vermillion