The office of HANNAH, supported by Leslie Lok and Sasa Zivkovic, can be a U.S.-based design and analysis application that has been experimenting with digital style and fabrication techniques through all kinds of comes from piece of furniture to urbanism. Each a professor on the university’s faculty of Architecture, Art and Planning, Leslie and Sasa run a studio with a focus on innovative design, where technology plays a vital role in their work, combined with a keen study of materials, new applications, and construction techniques, leading to highly inventive projects.
The Ash Shack, a robot-built, 3D printed prototype in New York State, is one of his most recent projects. The uniqueness of the project lies in the use of problematic ash wood, which its abundance is associated in the environmental issue of the area, as it has only a few reusable applications at the moment. The use of advanced and customized technology applied during this project has allowed the reuse of this material, which combined with an overlapping structure of concrete written in 3D, resulted in a very case study in the long term construction of the property. The final aesthetic of the cabin, on the other hand, remains natural and raw, integrating seamlessly with its surroundings, despite its modern construction.
Leslie Associate in Nursingd Sasa, speaking about the HANNAH work center, tells us more about this project and its technique.
HO: At HANNAH, our method is deliberately hybrid and there is a lot of feedback between technologies, styling strategies, materials and production tools. We tend to work at the same time with sketches, 3D models, physical models, total prototypes and digital simulations. Each style of operation has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Together, the different ways of working tend to speak to each other, and at the same time inform us.
HO: Our works represent an interplay between bottom-up processes that derive from digital fabrication technologies and top-down processes that derive from our own stylistic biases and the studio needs of a project. On the one hand, we want to play with the principles and constraints of fabrication and that we strongly embrace the bottom-up fabrication logics that are drawn from digital processes. HO: For the 3D printed concrete components of the cabin, we used Cornell RCL’s self-built 3D printer, known as Deadalus. Sasa designed and created the printer together with his students in 2016 and that HANNAH changed in 2018 to expand the overall size of the printer to 9x18x9 feet. For the ash wood part of the building, we have a tendency to use a recent 15-year-old KUKA KR200/2 that RCL purchased on eBay for $8,000. The KUKA golem was hacked and equipped with an oversized bandsaw in order to make it suitable for numerous types of robotic wood fabrication. The cab was designed and engineered by HANNAH, with support from Cornell RCL. We tend to use odd-toed ungulate for digital modeling and Grasshopper with the KUKA|prc plugin to drive the robot.
HO: In the case of the Ashen hut, the raw nature of the materials could be a pragmatic manifestation of the fabrication processes and material used. We tend to embrace the furnished and striated nature of 3D printed concrete, with all its imperfections. The horizontal lines are nothing more than the result of the manufacturing process, as are the resulting patterns of the formed concrete.
For the wood envelope, we have taken an identical approach. The envelope is constructed of wood from trees affected by the emerald ash borer, which threatens to eradicate billions of ash trees in North America. The 3D printed legs and base, for example, are categorized as individual elements along the connecting slab, which breaks up the amount of concrete and emphasizes a transition from horizontal to vertical systems: all concrete is horizontally grooved, per the development logic of 3D printing, while the wood is vertically grooved, to make the differentiation between the systems, referencing ancient barn building techniques in the area. Separately, the systems express the tectonic logic with other nuances. The ornamentation of the 3D printed concrete floor, for example, is another direct result and expression of the manufacturing process. On the wooden facade, for example, the door surface gently peels outward to form an oversized doorknob. In addition to most
In addition to most systems, ash wood and 3D printed concrete, we tend to also use “normal” materials such as laminate for black window frames or wood joists for domed surface ceilings.
HO: Ten BEF-infested ash trees with their natural geometries were used in the ash hut development. We tend to use a cross section of typical Cornell Arnot forest ash trees, some of which we tend to pluck straight and others curved. Our analysis team used hand scanners to obtain a digital version of all the logs, with which it was customary to calibrate our initial styles based on the obtainable materials and geometries. After completing this first styling method, we used 3D scanning to index the logs that were assembled in front of the golem for fabrication. By being 3D scanned in place, we adjust the trajectory of the cutting implement for the robot, matching the digital model to physical reality. 3D scanning enables the U.S.A. Accurately and methodically cut irregular log geometries with robotic equipment.
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