Bending Cylinders

The work is part of ongoing research first deployed in a temporary structure designed for a low-income neighborhood park in Cambridge, MA, and now developing into proposals for other communities across the country to address the racial wealth gap through climate equity and resiliency efforts.

The continued research aims to improve on the design and construction strategies in three primary ways. First, to streamline the process of flat-to-form construction to make it more participatory and require less skilled labor. The goal is to make these structures deployable by anyone in the community to serve a range of purposes, from temporary shelters for disaster relief, to public art interventions (detailing/construction research). Second, to improve on the variations of types of spatial forms that can be produced using this technique, and to reduce the reliance on external structural components so that the geometry of the folded surfaces can act both as structure and membrane, requiring less invasive strategies for anchoring to the ground (design research).

Additionally, the technique is being developed to explore more formal variations at different scales, both for enclosures larger than small shade structures, as well as at the scale of furniture items.

2022 - present