POINT … 3D printing for architectural models

Järva, Stockholm 2010

Betania Hjemmet, Frederiksberg 2013

Poetic Pragmatism - an exhibition at the Danish Architecture Center that shows the work of the Copenhagen architects Laust Sørensen and Michael Droob and their studio POINT - is interesting because they use recent technology extensively in the presentation of their projects.

Rather than photographs, the images in the exhibition are digital and rendered although the use of CAD is now so well established that is hardly worth commenting on but their graphics team have developed consistent and distinct styles to reflect the character of the studio and that is interesting. 

All the building projects shown in the exhibition include printed 3D models and a working printer is set up in the exhibition so 3D printing is still enough of a novelty to be worth demonstrating.

This use of 3D printed models raises some wider or general concerns that are not unique to POINT but simply the number of models shown together here means that it is possible to see how 3D modelling can be used through a wide range of projects.

Printed models here are of a high quality and show fine detail and the printer has been used to lay down topography by following map contour lines - so making good use of digital data that is now available. These models show clearly how the different parts of the buildings relate to each other in terms of levels or alignment - if they are parts of a complex group - and show distinct mass or form well but here, as is usual, all are a standard off-white colour and look, if anything, ethereal with little indication of the character of the building materials and no indication of colour in those materials.

There is also an odd sense of scale or rather a lack of a sense of scale - so for most of the models it is a matter of trying to judge possible floor heights or use a doorway or in some models a human figure to work out possible dimensions. This is obviously not a problem that is specific to POINT … just that in this exhibition every project was shown with a model but not at a consistent scale because that is determined by the size of the printer although some models were built up from a series of parts so were larger.

Of course, the irony is that to produce any digital drawing from a printer or any model from a 3D printer then you have to key in a scale but it is rare to see that displayed on models or at least rare in exhibitions.

One model is of the gallery here at the Danish Architecture Center with the arrangement for this exhibition and that does show well the amazing advantage of being able to make relatively cheap and extremely accurate models.

The space of this gallery is complicated and almost impossible to imagine from just a written description until you get well into a large number of words so if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the going rate for a printed 3D model?

However, and it is a big however, although 3D printed models, like virtual reality, rendered CG and digital maps, all have a significant role in architectural presentations and although I know that I'm probably showing I'm a bit staid - I'm old enough to have been taught to draw on a drawing board with parallel motion using a scale rule and still prefer paper maps than trying to work out where I am from a screen 75mm by 50mm - and I do accept that if people do not work as designers or architects or engineers then they can find plans and elevation drawings and isometrics difficult to use when they try to imagine a finished building.

The problem is that without those 'old' skills it is difficult to judge scale and context for a proposed building and even easier to be beguiled by what we are presented with by an architect or a developer. My argument has always been that no architect, if he wanted to be paid, draws the building with all it's warts and problems and maybe it is even easier to make people judge the presentation rather than see through that to what might be the problems of its built reality when it is CGI or a 3D printed model.

Obviously I'm not suggesting that that is what POINT are doing with their models but simply that the presentation of their projects with a consistent use of printed models got me thinking and that is one function of an exhibition like this … to present work to an audience who then want to know more about why and how?

POINT

Kronetronen
Project for Frederiksberg have - the Frederiksberg Gardens

 

the 3D printer (above) at work in the gallery and the 3D model by POINT of the gallery space at BLOX and showing here the sweep of fabric they have at the lowest gallery level for their virtual reality programme.

This model of the gallery is a good example to show where modelling in 3D is an extremely useful way of showing complex space or, as here, a very complex space.

There are three levels to the gallery with a wall of glass on one side and on the other side a steep narrow staircase that rises up from the book shop at the bottom to a large landing but with small intermediate landings giving access to each level of the gallery. From the large top landing a staircase and an elevator, parallel and set close together, return back over the gallery for access to the main upper exhibition area.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then a good 3D model of a complicated space should be worth a fair few more.

 

Fur - An Issue of Life and Death

 

At one extreme you get people whose whole life revolves around design - names, companies, styles, the latest and the best - and at the other extreme people who insist that they know nothing about design - state categorically they are not interested in design - and normally finish by saying that they simply know what they like.  Curiously, it is often those very people, the non-designers - who are wearing the latest and the best training shoes and judge people they meet by the label on the jeans they are wearing. Fashion is the one discipline of the design World that people who do not work in the design World actually do often know about. 

Although I like buying good clothes and despite spending much of my time thinking about design, I’m not actually that interested in fashion - the reason why posts here about fashion are few and far between. I’ve never been to a fashion show and I can only recognise the most obvious designers if shown an outfit. For that reason, and also because I do have misgivings about fur used for fashion, I had not been to the current exhibition at the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen - Fur - An Issue of Life and Death.

I was at the museum on Sunday in the shop trying to track down a book I wanted. Half way out of the door I thought that as I was there I might as well have a quick look at the exhibition and actually I was very glad that I did.

 

 

This is a beautifully presented and very clever and thought-provoking exhibition.

The two main displays face each other across the space with a curve of mannequins wearing traditional clothing from Greenland, North America, Siberia and Scandinavia facing an arc of figures wearing ‘fashionable’ clothing in fur.

 

 

At the centre - between fashion and tradition - are very informative displays about the raising of animals for pelts and about traditional methods of hunting and preparing the skins. The labels are completely unbiased, non-political, simply presenting the information and statistics without comments … for instance there is a straightforward map of Europe that shows which countries allow farming of animals for fur and those countries where it is banned.

 

 

Interactive displays around the edges are, in some ways, more interesting, encouraging people to decide. There are panels where you can feel samples of fur and have to guess if it is real or fake before lifting the flap to reveal the answer; there are interviews with people on the street asking them about what they think about fur for clothing and asking them why they are wearing natural fur or why they are wearing fake fur and there is one area where visitors can try on a range of fur coats and stand in front of a large projected image to take a selfie but by swiping a touch screen they can select different backgrounds for their photos from a grand interior - suggesting curiously that maybe fur was OK for grand people living in grand house? - to a fashion cat walk to an image that puts you in a fur coat standing in front of an anti fur protest.

The use of new technology here for information and for labels is superb - I particularly liked the use of a thermal imaging camera where you can hold in front of yourself or wear coats in different fabrics and in fur to see how much or how little body heat escapes - and fur does do a very good job of keeping you warm.

The traditional costumes are amazing both for their diversity and for the incredible craftsmanship. And there the ethics question is maybe easier because fur is a natural material and was all that was available. 

If you don’t want to confront your own political and ethical views about the use of fur for fashion clothing it is still well worth going to see the exhibition just look at those traditional clothes. 

 

 

the exhibition is at the Nationalmuseet / The National Museum in Copenhagen
and continues until 22 February 2015

 

Biography by Elmgreen & Dragset

 

Yesterday I went back to take another look at the installations by Elmgreen & Dragset at the National Gallery of Denmark in Copenhagen … I had been thinking about my first visit and wanted to look at the pieces again before the exhibition closes on the 4th January.

The three large-scale installations, under the general title Biography, feel initially very different in atmosphere and feel very different in the way the viewer looks at each one. The main work, The One & the Many, has been erected in the entrance hall of the gallery and is the representation of a stark, three-storey apartment building. There is an entrance door but it is locked so we are kept out and, as on any public street in any town or city, our view in is restricted to what we can see through windows. The rooms we can see into are completely realistic using appropriate furniture and curtains and personal possessions to make the viewer feel, almost too easily, that they can understand the ‘back story’ of what appears to be the sad, lonely and alienated lives of the tenants of the block. What is surreal is our position … we are outside and when we take our noses away from the window glass we are suddenly back in an art gallery.

The second gallery space is completely the other way round in that there is absolutely no sense of an exterior. There is a corridor and we have a choice of which way we turn but in the end we come back to the same point anyway.

There is a suggestion that this is a characterless, everyday, scruffy and barely maintained government department or local council office with waiting rooms, ticket offices and even a toilet but there are no staff … no signs to tell us we have come to the right place.

This is the extreme of de-personalised public space but everything is surreal. Everything is wrong and frustrating: one door has hinges and handles on both the left and the right side so could not open; another door opens to reveal another locked door immediately behind it; the basins in the toilet have the most weird plumbing and so it goes on. Again the sense is of alienation but this time ours on entering this parallel world.

 

The third gallery appears to be a continent away … Las Vegas, the ultimate city of escape and dreams ... a Las Vegas night … a fire escape with a bored teenager sitting there high up with his legs dangling over the edge … a mobile home broken by a fallen sign … and … most disconcerting of all … the swimming pool of a motel beyond a chain-link fence … guarded by a snarling dog throwing itself at the fence … and with the body of a man floating face down. These are the images of a fractured and alien world … or at least alien to Copenhagen. I know Nevada fairly well and this violence and darkness is not so implausible there. For someone coming from western Europe then arriving in California, Nevada, the Mid West it can feel as alien and surreal as this. 

 

What has all this to do with a blog about design?

That’s why I went back.

On my first visit I looked at the installations as I would many art exhibitions … as a fascinating insight into the view point of the artist and as an interesting comment on contemporary life … 

Then thinking about it I realised that much of the impact of the show and the way the artists get us to look and think is to view modern architecture, modern graphics, everyday furniture, popular taste and style, with the clinical, detached observation of a cartoonist or a satirist. Their view is not harsh or unsympathetic - in fact just the opposite - but never-the-less they are detached and frighteningly analytical.

Each room in The One & the Many has an inherent coherence that allows us to guess at the age, sex, character of the tenant. The wallpaper is right for the character they have created, the style of furniture or lack of furniture, the books and magazines or the lack of books and magazines, the pictures on the walls are all the things that character would have chosen … or rather … because the artists chose them we project onto the rooms our preconceptions about what a person like that would be like. That’s fine. We are above that out here in the real world outside the art gallery. We don’t judge a person on their clothes. We don’t judge people for their taste in carpets. Fine.

But actually look around you right now. Look at what you have bought recently.

In those rooms in The One & the Many even the food packaging, the typography of the books and magazines, the colours chosen were all consistent and are all so revealing. Do we really expose so much about who we are whenever we choose one product over another? Facebook and Google would like to think so.

Aldi or Irma, IKEA or Illums Bolighus, Berlingske or Politiken all judge us … and chose the typefaces, the colours, the sizes, the options and variations they choose to offer us … because they know us … or think they know us … or hope they know us … their core audience.

So is successful design about anticipation and manipulation? 

Is good design the design of an object that will end up in a museum collection? Or is good design the design that sells and allows the manufacturer to survive if not thrive? Is good design what we like or what a marketing man thinks we will like? Is good design the design of an object we see and decide we really must buy or is good design the object we buy because we have seen the ad that makes us realise we want it? Is good design the object that looks amazing or the object that works day after day in the background?

And finally - to flip it around - if we put up with bad design or, come to that, choose to buy something that we accept is badly designed ... what does that say about us? Generally I guess it is usually that we don't have the time, or the money or the energy to search out the alternative. In part, what Elmgreen and Dragset are saying is that as life becomes more difficult and people become more isolated then clearly good design or any choice between good or bad design becomes less and less relevant.

And on a lighter note I missed an amazing photo opportunity yesterday as I stood in the gallery looking up at the figure of the boy sitting high up on the fire escape wearing his hoodie and jeans and trainers. A teenager came into the gallery wearing a hoodie and jeans and trainers plus a baseball cap on backwards and he walked or rather scuffed along under the fire escape and peered through the wire fence at the body floating in the pool; shrugged; turned and scuffed out without looking up at the boy, or the representation of a boy about the same age above him. I didn’t get the lens cap off my camera quickly enough to capture the moment. It was surreal. I felt old and tired ... alienated … an observer.

 

Biography, by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

continues until 4 January 2015