Frankie

Group work of three people focused on amalgamations of three different raw materials and later building a 1:1 size pavillion consisting of the materials.

Our group chose wood, wire and earth as our three materials, wood for binding wire for tensile strength and earth for compression. Early test was made on how wood can be bent and formed by sewing into the material, It was noticed fast that this method worked and provided good results that provided us with our starting point.

By sewing two pieces of wood together while bending them a reversable result of bending can form, to tie this in with the earth the wire is used once again to sew the wooden structure onto a stomped earth base. While its main purpose was to bind the earth and wood the wire also provided stability for the rammed earth so there was no need for further reinforcements.

Moving to a 1:1 scale and a height of almost three meters new challenges appeared, no longer could we just drill holes through both of the wooden slabs then sew them together. It was now needed to cnc-mill these holes at the same time as the other patterns where cut out, since they are bent and then sewn we needed to do a realistic 3D-model of the structure with almost milimeter precision on the overlapping of the holes. This turned out better than expected as the wood is still quite flexible when not fused with eachother so minor misscalculations could be ignored.

Over 10 000m of sewing thread was used when fusing the wood of the two structure as we had developed a cross-stitch technique that was fast but very thread consuming. In the base of the structures we added two seating modules that we sew two cushions for as to provide a nice way to observe the structure from below.

We could not scale up the rammed earth as that would require to much earth to transport into the courtyard at Chalmers, instead we added weights in the form of bricks that where inserted into the back of the structure to provide a counter weight. This was not really needed tho as when we built the seating modules the structure was stable enough in itself.