Jordan Parsons » S09 Final: Knot

S09 Final: Knot

Posted By: Jordan Parsons

The assignment was to take an existing project, and use our final three weeks to take it even farther. There were stipulations of course, and I was steered towards my knot project. The knot project was a wood shop project, that was to interpenetrate a knot into five segments. I had chosen the taught line hitch knot to make out of cherry. For this final project the five segment design was to be turned into a space to hold five pieces of art in the side of a cliff. This seemed like a stretch, but it lead to interesting results. Gallery – Jump to the pictures.

The Process began with looking at the spaces created inside the knot. I started with projecting planes along the sides of the five segment knot to enclose it, selecting the outermost planes and working them around the knot resulted in an outer shell which was the mass of the museum. I struggled with the internal divisions, I was not happy with them for a while, they were too simple for the semi-chaotic outer shell. My professor suggested that I try to be more chaotic with them, so I went along those lines at his suggestion to attempt to create disorientation for someone experiencing the space by hiding the art pieces, and by moving them across uneven levels.

The Model was fabricated from laser cut acrylic, and a plaster 3D print. Due to size constraints the final model was purely a massing model, showing how the project was situated on the landscape, but the clear acrylic accomplished the representation of the cliff in a manner far better than I had hoped. It slightly obscured the 3D print in a manner that added to the complexity, sort of a reflection of the inside.

The Visulizatons were created for Introduction to Digital Media II in Rhinoceros & V-Ray, from the model the 3D print and laser cuts came from.

In Conclusion I know there is so much more I could have done with the project, little things still irk me, but in the end I am please for what it was. The final project of my first year in architecture school. I felt the reviews went really well, I received a lot of great feedback from some truly great judges, and I am so ready to try again in August.