How can we transform "worthless" residual materials from wood processing into valuable, resource-efficient, effective, and attractive material systems and prototypes for design and architecture? To answer this question, irreguLAB puts to work technology, collaboration, experimentation, and, not least, a keen sense of design.
After working exclusively with crooked timbers in the last semester's project "irreguLAB I," this semester, an interdisciplinary team of students and staff from the faculty of Art and Design and the faculty of Architecture and Urbanism is dedicating itself to the next specific case: the tree fork, or the "Y." The aim is to design furniture and spatial structures as three-dimensional networks made from tree forks.
The project begins with an intensive, collaborative, three-week preliminary exercise, during which a table formed as a network of forks is planned and built. Design and technology workflows (scanning, modeling, simulation, fabrication) are learned in a rapid and playful manner. Initial experiments with digital fabrication are also conducted. Special emphasis is placed on learning skills in modeling (Rhino Sub-D, Fusion), programming (Grasshopper), and digital fabrication, as well as integrating these into "Design for Fabrication." These skills enable us not just to obediently follow what is found but rather to develop an independent, contemporary, and innovative design language with an experimental flair, one that can engage in dialogue with the found geometries and materials.
In the main task, students develop their own furniture designs and corresponding topological fork networks. The typology and scale of these designs (whether a stool, chair, table, shelving system, coat rack, partition wall, etc.) are left open. The scalability of such a topological approach ("Can the shelf or table be reimagined as a three-story building or a space frame?") adds a particular appeal. Short, workshop-like explorations at model scale alternate with longer, intensive trials of their full-scale, digitally-materialized implementation.
The project builds on the established infrastructure of irreguLAB: the forks are digitized through 3D scanning and cataloged in a shared database, which can be parametrically queried and is directly connected with non-standardized design workflows. The collected wood is debarked under high pressure and dried in a solar kiln on campus. The designs are implemented iteratively, prototypically, and in real scale, using multiple fabrication technologies. In addition to CNC milling, workflows are developed that intelligently materialize digital geometries and logics using analog tools. This includes the digital fabrication of templates, while simultaneously exploring, in a seminar attached to the project (Kirschnick & Su Ko: "Augmented Reality Assisted Woodworking"), the possibility of AR fabrication with a specially developed hand bandsaw device. The bottom line: it will be digital, it will be experimental, and it will be workshop-intensive!
The project is conceived in the spirit of research-based teaching and builds on the work of other researchers in the field of sustainable and digital-material design and architecture, who have advanced the idea of "inventory-constrained design" over the past decade, specifically using tree forks, such as LIMB (Michigan), Conceptual Joining (Vienna Academy), and Hooke Park (AA, London). Some of these design researchers, along with artists and wood historians, have been invited to give talks as part of the "irreguLAB Talks" series.
irreguLAB Y is the fourth in a series of projects, seminars, and specialist courses under the umbrella of irreguLAB, a teaching lab funded by the Foundation for Innovation in University Teaching, focused on digital design and fabrication using irregular materials.