Columbia GSAPP 3D printed designs Watercolor

Columbia GSAPP 3D printed designs Watercolor

Alistair Gill and Veronika Schmid held a Saturated Models seminar at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. During the seminar the Master’s students explored 3D printing and created 3D printed objects. i.materialise made the resulting 3D prints. This is the second interview with a team of participating architecture students. The first one is here.

1. Who are you? We are Kasey Josephs and Kurt Rodrigo both originally from the Western United States, hailing from Arizona and California, respectively.  We are recent graduates of Columbia University”s Master of Advanced Architectural Design program and are passionate about architecture, music, and cake. 

2. What is Watercolor? Watercolor as a medium blends color to blur the boundary between hues and tones.  The Watercolor Wall is a prototype for a wall paneling system that uses this similar technique to create dynamic space around the wall.  The relationship between the user and the wall is ever-changing based on the time of day and the nature of the interaction. 

3. Why did you make it? We made this object with two intentions.  One, we are interested in going beyond our preconceptions of what an architectural model should be and two, we want to push the limits of the rapid prototyping capabilities. 

4. What software did you use to make it? We used a mixture of top-down and bottom-up logic with Rhinoceros and Grasshopper.  What this means is we allowed the computer to generate a base form and then manually manipulated this form in order to produce a new outcome. 

5. What was the process by which you came to your design? The process we used to create the Watercolor Wall involved layering various techniques such as puncturing, twisting, scaling, and blending.  These operations were then re-ordered and re-applied at various stages of the process, yielding original, innovative form. 

6. Will you be using 3D printing more often in the future? We are definitely interested in using 3D printing more often in the future.  We are very impressed with the machines” capabilities and the turn-around time.

Photos are by Julie Jira.