Arch: BambooFolly

Cornell/S1/Y1/730 

This was a first-year, first-semester project during the hurricane, which is an architecture first-year course. It is a bamboo structure in a forest. By designing based on the structure of grass, the material system I created is coded into a 2D surface and then bent into shape to create 3D structures. By codifying larger and smaller circles on a surface, you can control how readily the whole structure will bend or morph around local changes in density. The exploration led to many iterations of possible spatial conditions and the final model is just one of infinite. By learning from curved folds in paper - going from 2D to 3D forms using geometric frustration - (that’s a real thing and I LOVE it so much) we end up with a playful structure in the woods. The next step for this project, at some point in the future, is to design structures using FEA that automatically expand into their coded spatial conditions given a small external force. The buzzwords for that are “compliant, bistable material systems” - or, in a more human tone, “things that can bend and things that bend in weird ways.” Long story short, curved folds do strange things to 2D planes. Those strange things become more strange things in the woods. 

Studio Professor: II Hwan Kim