Jim Sauer
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[2009-07-10]
The class was organized around a semester-long project that included elements of digital drawings, physical fabrication and research. Early in the semester teams were assigned and each team was given a particular house to study. My team and I spent the semester focused on the Frank Lloyd Wright designed "Usonian Automatic Prototype". This design was never built in this form, but did influence several built Frank Lloyd Wright works.
I'll admit that this class was not my favorite class last year. My team (Mike, Alison, Heather, Shuba and I) and the entire class (including, to be fair, the TAs and the professor) suffered through a difficult semester. Looking back I see that I did learn a lot, and I am proud of my work.
Here's the final drawing I did for the class. This drawing includes two digital renderings of the house (a small one set at night and a large one in daylight) along with a floor plan and a rendering of the various block details from the house. All of the drawing was done in Autodesk AutoCAD 2009 and the renderings were done in Autodesk 3ds MAX. The page was composed in Adobe Illustrator using a photograph I took many years ago while backpacking.
My favorite part of the project was done in a smaller, two-person, group with my friend Mike. Together we designed, digitally modeled, and created a set of configurable formwork that could be used to create any of three variations on the blocks used in the house. We chose to fabricate the more complicated corner blocks. Using our formwork we created a series of blocks in concrete. Here are some photos of the final block we created:
Mike and I came away impressed with the design of the house and the potential for creating reasonably priced high design homes that could be built by individuals without too much special knowledge of construction.
Mike and I worked well together: we had fun coming up with ideas, we were able to quickly work together to figure out which of those ideas were worth using and which were bad, and then we had more fun implementing the good ideas. All without getting on each others nerves. Well, not too much anyway.
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