Object Studies

The Spring 2015 3B studio at SCI-Arc began designing in a search for the “features” which defined any particular object. In exploring this, an initial study was done of everyday objects in order to understand what gives them their special recognizability. In this case, the dice was examined as a "primitive" with formal potential.

Once these features were determined, their geometry was thoroughly documented and exploited to exaggerate and study the effects on familiarity which would be accomplished. Obscuring, enlarging or relocating features played a key role in determining the level to which these objects could become pliable geometrical forms.

Having developed this series of objects in the early parts of the 3D studio, another set of studies began to look at how to combine them into aggregations. During this step, the advantageous nature of the interior voids produced by the dice form proved it to be most optimal for conversion into a building.

Adjacencies, tangencies and mimicry became the key formal drivers of the aggregation, tying parts and wholes together across geometrically separate elements.

Geometrically, the form is produced by the extrusion of a cylinder through a cube, mimicking a misinterpretation of sorts of the dice’s logic when viewed in elevation. These variables are inscribed into all the drawings in the forms of construction geometry which annotates the precise origins of each fold, crease or tangent.

Rather than being understood sculpturally, compositionally or homogeneously, this organization begs a deep contemplation of abutment and adjacency as potential parameters for formal distribution and generative development of rigid comprehensive systems of geometry.