GH4CNC Workshop @ TaMaCo

GH4CNC Workshop @ TaMaCo

On May 2018 we had the opportunity to collaborate with TAMACO, a research lab in Design & Architecture based in Buenos Aires and run by Francesco Milano and Karen Antorveza. Andrea and Marco taught a 3 days workshop in Buenos Aires.

The brief was:

The workshop, aimed at promoting digital fabrication technologies as active creative tools for the design practices, is specifically oriented to the exploration of a non-conventional use of CNC milling machines by means of user-generated machine instructions (g-code) directly inside the Rhinoceros/Grasshopper 3D modelling environment.

The main goal of the 3 days will be the exploration of the intersection area between design and fabrication, exposing participants to the logics of associative modelling and algorithmic programming in Grasshopper – a visual programming environment embedded in Rhinoceros – as well as to the fundamental principles of digital fabrication with a 3-axis CNC router. By establishing a real code-to-machine workflow, participants will escape from a linear and purely replicational idea of production, where the physical object should be as adherent as possible to its digital counterpart. Instead, by coding and embedding additional levels of material information in the digital model, unexpected physical and aesthetic properties will arise, ultimately letting the production and fabrication phase become an integral part of a non-linear, feedback-based design process.

The expected outcome of the workshop will be a set of custom-designed CNC-shaped foam/stryrofoam blocks, interepreted both as finalized cladding elements and as formworks for casting operations. Their visual and aesthetic attributes will be directly bond to a set of digital and physical interdependent factors – e.g input geometry, foam density, drill bits typology, spindle speed. Participants’ decisions and choices inside this design/fabrication parameter space will determine a set of unique boundary conditions for the developement of the unique emerging material processes.

You can check the photo gallery here >> https://is.gd/BzlZSa or on the TAMACO website here >> https://tamaco.chela.org.ar/GH4CNC