This was an entire group project, in which we decided to tackle mental health issues.
1. Concept Overview
The project started from discussions of roles everybody will take and thinking from what angle mental health should be approached.
Calculation of proportional translation into big scale, and establishing how much of fabric we need:
Fabric pinning to see how fabric is able to support the structure without tape. It worked! The previos shape won’t be able to become a shelter, so I had to brainstorm quite a bit how I can modify it to create something that is able to become our cocoon. This is the shape I ended up with:
Here I needed to get fabric pinned on this structure, but cut tape off a little too soon. As I later established it should be cut after all fabric is pinned first. This mistake turned into a disaster as I broke my rods and had to go to Canal Plastics again to buy new ones. I also needed more pins. More shopping.Here are new rods, and second version of mini model On the small model I started to come up with marking system to keep my eye on the symmetry.Possible roof idea I had to cut and pin and mark fabric to find out the pattern multiple times by trial an error checking how tension works.
Petal and roof: (for some reason I don’t have an image of the final mini model with the roof attached, as time was a big factor and I rucshed to take it off to calcualte how much of the fabric we need for big structure so we can start attaching big pieces of fabric to see how it will work)
That was less than two weeks before the installation date.
I brought my partner to brainstorm, as I didn’t find solution that can be found in the last image in sketches neat, or easily and efficiently buildable. And on that day our tent poles started to snap and break.
These poles don’t work for a few reasons. Well, first is apparent – they break. Second – they are too thin for this structure, they looked thicker on Amazon. Also, I established on that day that these connectors work against us. If you hold with both of your hands continuous line of petal it doesn’t twist, connectors allow the line to twist, which isn’t something that we want.
Next step for me now is to find different thicker continuous rod.
Since that happened 5 days before the installation I had to come up with new structure, as there was not enough time to get new rods and experiment with tension and pattern of the fabric.
Come back to square one.
Lashing is fun, easy and sturdy! At this point Erin arrived, and we decided to move to bigger space, and at that point I decided to post pone my lashing experiments to use time efficiently so we can start solving fabric challenge.
Fabric was already cut to the shape of petals for previous structure, so we had to map it onto triangular surface of our structure. We created big triangle pattern, did some measurements and math and started to map.
It took us good amount of time to go over the edge because it was very badly cut.
The event photos of everything coming together:
Goal for future: To solve tensile structures!
I’m very happy I took that risk and tried, even though I wasn’t able to accoplish this task into short timeline. I think I was realistically too dare to risk, but hey you need to fail multiple times in order to succeed.