According to the DCL website, “We believe architecture should be wholly digital – from the scale of the micron and particle to the brick, beam and building. This embodies a fundamental shift in architecture and design thinking that is unique to our research and projects. In our work we have demonstrated that an architecture that is digital can close gaps between the way in which we design and the way in which we fabricate and assemble objects, buildings and even infrastructure.”
The design team is led by DCL’s two co-directors, Manuel Jiménez Garcia and Gilles Retsin; other team members include Vicente Soler, Ignacio Viguera Ochoa, and Miguel Angel Jimenez Garcia, with fabrication support by Soler and Nagami Design.
Just like Bartlett’s CurVoxels filigree chairs, the Voxel Chair v1.0 was modeled after Danish designer Verner Panton’s iconic, S-shaped Panton chair, designed in the early 1900s. The shape has a complex cantilever geometry, and is immediately recognizable. After the CurVoxels chair project, DCL set out to create software that would allow them to generalize the Panton chair design approach and test out various versions of the chair, while enabling others to mimic the process. As opposed to the original solid plastic Panton chair, DCL’s Voxel Chair v1.0 is actually a web of hollows, which was made by a continuous 2.36 km line of robot-extruded plastic.
“This may look like a Panton chair, but it’s actually completely different. The Panton chair was a pure surface, optimised to mould. This chair is the opposite: a cloud-like volume, optimised for robotic extrusion,” explained Retsin and Jiménez Garcia.
Retsin and Jiménez Garcia said, “This approach is not only more functional in terms of performance, but it also offers designers opportunities to really work directly with incredible amounts of data. Instead of designing the form of the chair, you design the behaviours and properties of the material directly.”
“As designers we can’t usually control these or use these tool paths themselves as a medium to design with – its a very top-down process. Our software allows designers to bypass this, and immediately design with the tool paths themselves – which gives you access to much more detail and control,” explained Retsin and Jiménez Garcia.
The DCL team’s software was the recipient of the 2016 Autodesk ACADIA Emerging Research Award for best paper, and will be presented this November at the 2017 ACADIA conference, held at MIT. To help reduce cost, and make the 3D printing process viable for industrial purposes, the team also developed a new extruder for the robot, which directly melts raw plastic pellets instead of using filament. Discuss in the Voxel Chair forum at 3DPB.com.
[Source: Dezeen / Images: DCL]