.10.95 fall option studio w/ Eric Owen Moss
from the beginning I had always thought of the skin as a smooth surface of either metal or stone. the surface could be divided up into pieces and each piece fabricated using cad/cam technologies. i didn't want to construct the surface out of facets which i saw as being the typical reation to constructing a surface of this type. at a certain point i realized that either method of construction, facets or cad/cam milling, were too easy. i wanted to find the logic of the surface. what were its rules?
as an attempt at representing these surfaces, i tried several methods. first was the contour map. the map is constructed by placing a reference plane in some relationship to the surface. successive cuts define the contours but the somewhat arbitrary positioning of the reference plane did not allow the surface to define a logic of its own. similarly by dividing the surface into a regular grid an arbitrary order interfears with the expression of the surface.
another method explored was the use of radiosity maps to uncover hidden logics contained within the surface.
radiosity map
radiosity mapping used to define contours
a method that i would like to investigate more thoroughly in the future would be to map the rate of change of slope on the surface. in a prvious project i used a slope map to help define circulation pathes on a smooth surface. a slope map uses a horizontal plane perpendicular to the line of gravity to reference the slope of the surface. however by using the rate of change of slope the only reference would be the surface itself. selecting the tolerance of the mapping could be determined by physical properties of the material.
defining an irregular surface with facets can be difficult with current software. most cad software will only describe a surface in a way that is related to the way it was defined. to represent the surface differently requires analyzing the surface in order to redefine the surface. this problem goes back to my Candela research.