Handmade Digital Design

This project was a proposal to the internal competition held during the Material & Detail course. The idea was to create an outdoor seating area for Chalmers Kårresturang customers. Currently this is an open space used to eat lunch by many students from the entire campus. Our goal was to create a large structure that catered to both of these groups as well as push the ideas of CLT construction and fabrication.

Snaking around the competition area, our design incorporates the required seating for customers of the student restaurant with the general student population. Sloping doing the path, the structure incorporates the landscape into the overall contoured structure. We developed this concept and overall shape by 3D scanning clay models and working with the resulting meshes. The focus of the structure is the large head that contains a bar and seating for the students. We envision the use of the location to morph depending on the student populations needs and time of day.

Even though the competition called for a large outdoor seating arrangement´, the focus of the course was the final phase. This is where we would work together as a class and produce a one-to-one prototype of the winning teams proposal. We envisioned a multi-use structure that would function as a bar/serving area as well as seating for students. As a proof of concept of our overall design, we chose a section of our proposal that we felt offered the most functional use as an object as well as showing all our design ideals.

The interlocking CLT plates are sized to be able to be handled by a few students as well as fit on our maximum milling area. The structure is punctured by our “super.-golf” holes that allowed to lighten the material but also hide some of our structural joints. The density and placement of the holes was determined by an overall concept of how we wanted to guide students of our intended use of the prototype. By splitting the larger structure we where happy to find that our overall concept still functioned. We learned quite a bit about our concept while delving into the details of our intended construction.