Digital Fabrication_Exercise 01_ Laser Cutting
In this first exercise of CNC laser cutting students have been given this pentagon base with internal structural plates where all the students have to worked out details to attach their structure, and there are three different type of pentagon with top edge is always being regular pentagon shape but the bottom edge is changing and the detail has been worked out to join them all together to keep them in place
The student will have to work inventively and creatively to conceive and produce a three dimensional object from two dimensional drawings exploiting the inherent properties of the material. By the end of the course, every student should be familiar with digital modelling, fabricating, documenting and assembling a structure.
Students should be able to invent strategies to translate geometry into an articulated constructible solution, producing the CAD file to be used for CNC cutting. The main particularity of the laser cutter as a fabrication technology is that it is exclusively used on flat materials, working with vectors.
The exercise focuses on the design of a vertical structure generated by a system of differentiated components. The goal of the exercise is to fabricate the highest structure using a maximum of 4 boards of 840×400 of 3mm or 5mm plywood sheets (1.35m²).
Students are invited to explore the proliferation of structural components using techniques such as bending, twisting, interlocking, ribbing, stacking, sectioning or contouring. During the exercise students have explored lot of techniques and details in order to use the laser cutter in order to change the rigid property of the 3 mm Plywood for bending, twisting, interlocking, contouring to produce their desired structure.