Timber Curtain: Designing with material capabilities

Timber Curtain explores relations between digital precision and material indeterminacy. It is an installation engaging spatially through its presence as a 1:1 architectural component as well as it is exploring novel technologies in the architectural design process from the very beginning of the generative phase to fabrication of the artefact. Brought together by various conceptual and structural elements the Timber Curtain forms a 4.5 x 2.5 x 0.5 m construct of assembled wood components, digitally crafted through advanced production techniques. Concerned with materiality and processing of the wood an associative digital model that could gather and compute in put from material behaviour and out put manufacturing data was scripted. This method enables material capacity to be pushed to the limit of its performance allowing novel sensuous and structural qualities to emerge. The method is developed with use of pinewood, processed with a 5-axis CNC router. The digital process generation and simulation is implemented with Rhinoceros 3D, Grasshopper and GHPython, and AlphaCAM was used for preparing the CNC-milling.