Absolute CAD

OK, eyes hurt. This thing is really simple actually, even though it's taken me ages to work out how to draw what was in my head. All it is is a 4m wide, 500mm thick slab, folded around itself so as to be a star shape when viewed from above. However, I stipulated that the verticals should be pitched inwards toward the centre at 30 degrees off the vertical. Also, I decided the corners should be curved to appear as natural as possible. Very simple rules, but quite a lot going on geometrically. There is a very slight problem due to AutoCAD 2002's limitations with 3D polyline smoothing, in that the 3D spline produced from the jagged line was circumscribed, as opposed to being a best-fit line through all the points. This is what causes the slightly abrupt fold where the curve joints join onto the straight sections... Ah well. I'm already a bit bored of this project. It does have exciting implications later when glazing is added to the roofed sections, however. There are two skewed parallelogram prisms intersecting, but the floor those sections are "open", which either means less floor or glass floors. Also, the design generates an excess of terraces and balconies, which may mean that these areas are asking to be treated in a material other than glass or wood, or conversely, that these sections should be enclosed in a more transparent way than the main vertical cladding material. Hmm...

Old dog, new tricks

Macromedia Freehand 7, Mac OS 9. basically drawing shapes and hitting the fractalise tool ad infinitum... I've recently been asked to do stuff in Illustrator but I must admit I have always preferred Freehand. It was fun when applications had a bit of competition... seems like Adobe own everything now, development could stagnate.

Timber...!

Back to the Kings Cross Thameslink Hotel project... this is a view of the massing model I used as a major step in planning out each floor, i.e, where to stick each room, circulation, where windows faced e.t.c... Pretty laborious stuff. Just to get to this stage, I built a foam model out of triangular shards, roughly where I wanted the hotel to be in the space on the site. I was trying to achieve a tree-like crystal form, a megastructure that was both organic and fractured, that paid particular care to its site, specifically the dome of the Scala next door. The overhanging "stalactite" part is a particular feature of the project, which attempts to "frame" the dome (some people might get some sexual vibes off that idea... none was intended when I designed it. Honestly!) Well... each point on the foam 'crystal' was plotted into AutoCAD and using boolean tools, I was able to plot the outlines of each floorplate, and cutting them out resulted in this glorious model. It's a shame that it fell over (I hadn't glued the supports from the 7th floor upwards, as it seemed to hold together pretty well with friction alone, but then the shallower supports I had made for the lower floors caused a structural collapse when it vibrated as I moved it... oops.