Modular Space
So I was pretty excited to start this project. Modularity seems like a very interesting concept and all the examples were really cool. I started this by thinking about the idea of modular modules. I wanted to start with basic shapes like squares and triangles and based my slits around efficiency in a grid. This way I could fit all my modules into a square and be able to construct them all with a straight edge. It also made cutting efficient. I decided it was worth doing the slits in a semi random way because I don’t have any experience with modularity and I’ll probably get similar results if I spent a bunch of time thinking about them.
For each of the modules I started by making a more abstract structure, and then trying to make some kind of structural base and expanding from there. I liked both results, but I think that a more structured approach makes it easier to perceive the cutouts as a space, but luckily that’s not what we have to worry about right now. I liked the structured version of the square the most I think, the HEX/OCTagona shape it made created a really interesting base for a structure to build up. The more structured triangular thing looked like a little creature which I liked. But I’m sort of just thinking about these as a space still so the abstract ones aren’t really worth talking about I think.
It was pretty funny bringing these into the crit because they were about 4x bigger than anyone else’s, I just missed it when we were told there was a size constraint. I liked everyones, a lot of people went for exploring these complex modular curves or polygonal shapes. It would be interesting to try to just create a repeating pattern and see what it makes, but I think it’s possible I missed that point. I think the real goal is to create something structured though, the weird abstract ones are fun but it’s so hard to precieve the shape because it looks different at every angle, the surface are so important to the feeling as well, if it looks like there are walls and a ceiling it’s a lot easier to picture a space.
So for the next version I decided to go with triangles again, sort of. I created a grid of equalateral triangles and tried to create different polygonal shapes: triangles, diamonds and trapazoids. About half way through I realized my modules were going to be so much smaller than I was hoping, while the trapazoid is about 3" long, the triangle is just 1. This was a little frusturating because I made my first one so damn big and I didn’t have enough material to make it bigger when it was supposed to be. But I figured it wouldn’t matter too much.
I was keeping with the idea of modular modules still, I like the idea and I like that it makes it super easy to cut, however I think I should branch out a little more, working with more organic shapes might help play with the vibe in the future, but I do think just doing basic shapes and playing with the slit placement is valueable too.
In retrospect I made the slits for these way to big, they were the same depth for all the modules, which just made the triangles not super structurally integral. I had to shorten one of the triangle slits because otherwise I would have just been cutting off a third of the triangle.
I had probably the hardest time so far trying to put these together, which makes sense because there’s more to think about than just fitting them together this time. I ended up going for sort of a pavilion style place, with the verb meandering. The idea is basically you have this little halway type thiing people can walk through and look at all the cool shapes.
I did like this thing a bit though. It has an interesting symetry and asymetry going on, from the front it’s symetrical, but from the back you can see some directionality as the trapazoids mover across.
So at this point we started to work together as a new group. We spent a lot of time discussing our mood, and I feel like our adjectives could have been incorporated earlier into our brainstorming process because we ended up with slightly discombobulated words. The main ideas were Bold as our mood, with our adjectives being something along the lines of organic/expanding and imposing.
We started with white paper when making our modules. We wanted to get some more organic modules. We created this grid of circles and drew lines around them until we had a few we liked. I think starting with white was a good idea to get form down, but adding a color was the next step towards bold.
So then we made the japanese flag version, this was an inbetween step for the next version which would be all red. The circle cut outs got an interesting repurpose.
I liked the red version, it’s definately bold. But I think it would be a difficult space to hang out in, it’s a super bold color and maybe is too imposing to be used as a space. But I think it got our words at least.
We also enclosed it in this foam core box and experimented with different lightings with our phones, I think it made the space feel really big and like this things was expanding through it. I’m feeling a little shacky about the holes though, I think their current state is making it too hard to precieve the form of the structure.
The main issues we found after our crit was that it didn’t really have a way to interact with it. The scale was way too big, this is a 6 story building right now. We decided to do a rework of our mood. We wanted to keep the boldness and organicness of our current structure but make it feel more approachable. Having a clear entrance and maybe changing the holes to be more interactable with the scale of the person. We thought about making the holes into some sort of modular climbing gym, or jungle gym type thing.
We decided to go for playful. With our adjectives being bold and organic. We changed our structure to have a much smaller scale (jungle gym size). We slightly altered the module to be more symetrical. I really liked this model I think it did a good job of looking playful and like someone could actually climb around and enjoy it.
Then I got covid.