Author: Eric

One of the big draws of using a great deal of CNC cut materials in the construction of structures has been the prospect of integrating the the interconnection of components into the components themselves. A few of the previous system attempts at building structures completely from CNC cut plywood have focused on some sort of tab principle to sidestep conventional mechanical fastening like screws or nails. This system offered by Clemson University has used something a bit different – the use of zip-ties to serve the inevitable need for fastening beyond the tab or friction-fit concept.

I’m still getting my head around the methods, processes and design elements necessary to carry this off. I’d assume that the integration of zip-tie fastening would actually be rather easy to do. Slithering plastic ties through wood components would really only require the placement of through holes at the right areas. That seems deliciously easy. In my mind, the tricky part would be to route the ties through in a manner where their best features are used in the strongest manner.

Thinking about zip ties, I’d figure that their strength lies in tensile loading and twisting forces. The weaknesses would be the fact that their flexibility would be difficult to mitigate when trying to get rigidity out of the connections. Perhaps this could be addressed in the remainder of the wood connection design where there isn’t sufficient directional latitude for the twisting to happen?

To this end, there seems to be painfully little imagery published of Clemson’s zip tie system to get an idea on how this system would be executed. Hopefully in the future, the university will mete out a bit more detail. Until then, I guess it’s back to the labs and the sketchbooks to try and arrive at how it could all work!

ArchDaily has posted a rather interesting selection of metal connectors meant for laminated wood products. At one level, the different methods are great to look at for seeing what’s available currently for such things and I’d also posit that they’re also great examples to draw from when looking into designing something a little more custom or further afield.

These 15 examples, for me, beg the question of whether there are ways where these connectors could be made with wood (engineered or otherwise) or even integrated into the laminate components themselves. Obviously this supposes that there would need to be a greater amount of fabrication per component and connector – and certainly a bit of engineering involved.

This thinking sort of dovetails with the previous post looking at how IKEA is working to reduce the overall part count and to an extent, the combination of materials and components. Perhaps the same can be done with architectural-scale projects.

Creating connectors out of wood does pose a few interesting issues, namely it would appear that most of these pictured in the article calls for bolting in two directions 90 degrees off from each other. This is a bit more complex with most wood products where grain tends to be an issue – and is certainly not the case with metals where strength is homogeneous no matter which direction.

It’s no secret that the availability of CNC fabrication opens a lot of doors for the design community, but how will it effect the next style movements?

The high-design world currently lives in a world that’s built on minimalism. No flash, no extraneous detail and the precision of shape. To see where tomorrow’s styling is going it’s important to understand how we got to this world of “Modern” that’s defined as “minimalism”.

Going back to just after the turn of the last century, we record a sea-change in the way the world styled things. If one focuses on only the International Style or Bauhaus that minimal style was created for the idealistic purpose of creating products so that all in society could achieve the same level of comfort. To remove a lot of the detail work was a primary method, in their minds, that would allow for the every-man to have such things we think of as common, like refrigerators, more furniture, tableware and various kitchen items of the so-called modern world.

How much cheaper would a coffee pot be if it wasn’t made by craftsmen that inscribed and forged  them into intricate shapes? They would be cheap enough for anyone to own as they’d be easy to make with a simpler manufacturing process. So too was the thinking behind the tube-framed furniture of LeCorbusier and Eileen Gray. Instead of time consuming labor done by craftsmen, a sofa could be formed with modern tools by certainly less skilled workers. This would drive down the cost of a couch to approach-ability.

While the aim of modern was admirable, their goals sadly did not translate to the real world. Modern became expensive and aimed at the exact group it was not designed for. We now associate clean lines and a desert of detail to “Modern”.

Only relatively recently has the world seen the true manifestation of the original desires for modern design. The companies leveraging these traits are companies like Target and IKEA. The lack of ornamentation works insanely well at reducing costs. This reduction has made living in the modern world relatively easy. But what now happens with design?

There can be no more subtraction, there must now be addition.

New tools like CNC machining has now opened the door for designers to more easily employ ornamentation into custom or low-count production runs. It’s also opened the door for the implementation of styling and design complexity far beyond what craftsmen can do – or more importantly – what we can afford craftsmen to do. Couple this with the notion that at a certain point simplification of designs can only go so far before there is no difference between designers and ornamentation becomes almost a necessary adaptation.

The new ornamentation will once again bring massive personalization but will require processes that can keep up. This will fall to digital fabrication processes where designers can design digitally and send these to firms to contract manufacture the results. Machines like CNC Mills and Lathes will be necessary to achieve the new design and styling intents.
At a certain level, there will be cottage industries of designers with CNC Mills in their shops, but there will also be the need for larger-scale implementations as designers tire of having satisfy the demands of designing and of operating complex machinery. But in the end, ornamentation will be reborn in the high-end design space, even if it’s manufacturers have given up the old ways of manufacturing items.

I think that when you look at where to apply today’s digital fabrication capabilities, it breaks down essentially into two camps: the desire for complexity and/or for precision. In a way, these two are really intertwined but for today it’s interesting to address them as separate requests.

Looking at complexity, this would be the pursuit of perhaps stylistic or artistic results that may have to fall on a machine to execute for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the project requires a level of skill that’s either impossible to find or virtually impossible to fund. A good example is of a bias relief treatment for decorative panels. A machine would be much more adept at holding a continuous level of faithfulness to the design across much more vast areas than could be expected or maybe even found with conventional human craftsmen. Not that I’m knocking human craftsmen – as it’s their skill over the millennia that’s opened the door for us to even consider the sorts of projects.

The other side of digital fabrication in my opinion would be the pursuit of a sort of umbrella of precision. For this, it’s best to picture the sort of fine joinery that human craftsmen of the highest quality have produced over the centuries. What makes all this work, whether of the Eastern schools or Western, is an extreme attention to detail. That very same detail is extraordinarily difficult to perform on today’s job sites. The modern builder is hamstrung by power tools designed for speed rather than craftsmanship and these builders have to work under increasingly tight budgets and tight deadlines. This old-world craftsmanship at an architectural level is left for only the very well off to afford and even they may just not prefer to outlay the time or the costs for such work.

This is perhaps one of the best applications of digital fabrication – the application of a machine’s inherent precision coupled with a tireless speed that can make structural joinery a reality. Both of these factors also serve to push down the cost of increasing the build quality in architecture at the same time.

Both of these features of today’s digital fabrication capabilities, complexity and precision have been executed at one time or another but there’s certainly a great amount of applications that are primed for even greater penetration of the market. Coupling both of these features with a designer’s or architect’s increasing reliance on the use of CAD and BIM, the notion of applying machine’s inherent strengths into both worlds seems all but inevitable