Free Build (May 2012)
This project was around a day and a half of free-form building to see what sort of forms would emerge. I got a chance to explore quite a few cardcepts that I will definitely be adding to my toolbox for use on later projects. While none of the buildings in this project really stand out as being particularly memorable, each one contained some unique opportunities to experiment with variations on common forms.
For a building by building breakdown, I'll start with the abstract building on the left:
I started this building as a horizontal grid, knowing that I wanted to create an S-shaped cutout to allow for shingling a curved bowl shape. But the rest of the structure sort of evolved organically as I built smaller and smaller grids on top of my first random shape. After I had built a few layers, and shingled the S-curve, I knew that I didn't want to use the same standard shingling all the way around. At first I tried a shingling pattern with "/\" shapes perpendicular to the normal shingling, basically trying to create a series of dormers. This worked, but was quite fragile, so I simple removed the dormers and left the voids where they would have been. The rest of the structure is mostly run-of-the-mill.
The middle building, the 4x1 slab with the "hole-in-the-wall" cutout, was actually built last. It was also built two times. This was really just a "filler" building because there was an awkward black void between the other two structures that I wanted to avoid in the photos. Anyway, the placement of this structure turned out to be very convenient, because the wall actually fell forward and flat on its face soon after the first time I finished it. Fortunately though, it collapsed directly between the two other structures and left them completely unaffected. So I rebuilt another one in its place.
Slab walls like this one can be quite unstable because they are virtually un-braced in two directions. Couple this with the facts that slabs have very a large surface area and that the taller they are built, the more top-heavy they get, and the potential precariousness associated with slab walls suddenly makes a lot of sense. Of course, the taller and wider a slab walls is, the more its surface area increases and some type of bracing becomes more and more of an advisable precaution against premature toppling.
The third, rightmost structure also has a few interesting components. The stepped facade features three "arched" entranceways of varying heights. The two smaller entranceways feature cards placed horizontally, like "/\", above the door. This is nothing too exciting but presented an interesting challenge because of the depth to which the horizontal cards penetrated the roofing grid. I had to align cells perfectly over the door to allow spaces for the tails of these horizontal cards to be hidden away inside the building. Thinking more about it now, in future uses of this technique, it might look neat to have the tails project out of the building (this would certainly make aligning the roof cell much easier).
The rest of the building was pretty simple, consisting of a tiered roof with low angled shingles. But when I got to the task of capping off the tower part of the building, I decided to experiment and have a bit of fun. I wanted to toy with non-uniform shingling, and what emerged was the "chaos roof". It took me many iterations of placing and removing cards to achieve a look that looked scattered but was still stable enough to remain in place. Almost every card had at least 3 points of contact with the structure and the design helped keep the roof surprisingly more stable than it appears.
So this project was relatively tame and not all that exciting to non-cardstacking geeks, but for helping work toward my long-term goal of subtly evolving familiar techniques, this project served its purpose quite well.
For a building by building breakdown, I'll start with the abstract building on the left:
I started this building as a horizontal grid, knowing that I wanted to create an S-shaped cutout to allow for shingling a curved bowl shape. But the rest of the structure sort of evolved organically as I built smaller and smaller grids on top of my first random shape. After I had built a few layers, and shingled the S-curve, I knew that I didn't want to use the same standard shingling all the way around. At first I tried a shingling pattern with "/\" shapes perpendicular to the normal shingling, basically trying to create a series of dormers. This worked, but was quite fragile, so I simple removed the dormers and left the voids where they would have been. The rest of the structure is mostly run-of-the-mill.
The middle building, the 4x1 slab with the "hole-in-the-wall" cutout, was actually built last. It was also built two times. This was really just a "filler" building because there was an awkward black void between the other two structures that I wanted to avoid in the photos. Anyway, the placement of this structure turned out to be very convenient, because the wall actually fell forward and flat on its face soon after the first time I finished it. Fortunately though, it collapsed directly between the two other structures and left them completely unaffected. So I rebuilt another one in its place.
Slab walls like this one can be quite unstable because they are virtually un-braced in two directions. Couple this with the facts that slabs have very a large surface area and that the taller they are built, the more top-heavy they get, and the potential precariousness associated with slab walls suddenly makes a lot of sense. Of course, the taller and wider a slab walls is, the more its surface area increases and some type of bracing becomes more and more of an advisable precaution against premature toppling.
The third, rightmost structure also has a few interesting components. The stepped facade features three "arched" entranceways of varying heights. The two smaller entranceways feature cards placed horizontally, like "/\", above the door. This is nothing too exciting but presented an interesting challenge because of the depth to which the horizontal cards penetrated the roofing grid. I had to align cells perfectly over the door to allow spaces for the tails of these horizontal cards to be hidden away inside the building. Thinking more about it now, in future uses of this technique, it might look neat to have the tails project out of the building (this would certainly make aligning the roof cell much easier).
The rest of the building was pretty simple, consisting of a tiered roof with low angled shingles. But when I got to the task of capping off the tower part of the building, I decided to experiment and have a bit of fun. I wanted to toy with non-uniform shingling, and what emerged was the "chaos roof". It took me many iterations of placing and removing cards to achieve a look that looked scattered but was still stable enough to remain in place. Almost every card had at least 3 points of contact with the structure and the design helped keep the roof surprisingly more stable than it appears.
So this project was relatively tame and not all that exciting to non-cardstacking geeks, but for helping work toward my long-term goal of subtly evolving familiar techniques, this project served its purpose quite well.