John and Seth recently took a trip to Vancouver to Joel Berman Glass Studios Ltd. to meet Joel and check out his studio. From their website:

Joel Berman Glass Studios is among the leading independent designers and manufacturers of architectural glass art and related glass products in North America. The company specializes in the design and fabrication of kiln-cast and pressure formed textured glass for a wide range of applications in corporate, commercial, hospitality, retail, governmental and residential environments worldwide.

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Following are images of milled surfaces we have been working on over the past year. Many of these surfaces are generated by custom scripts that one of our alumni, Skylar Tibbits, wrote while he was working here, and that we have continued to develop.

To create surfaces like these the digital information generated often looks nothing like the physical output. The creation of these surfaces requires a process of thinking and doing that is based upon contextual constraints that are determined by filtering design intent through the available means and methods of physical production. In the cases presented here, we were studying the ability to emphasize the topographies possible while operating within less than 1″ thick materials. We feel that this way of working - employing digital design and fabrication technology as guide along a journey, rather than the destination, that is often lacking in design today - at least based on what we see going on in design schools and professional practice.

Note: All of these images are fabricated, physical objects. None of them are computer generated images.

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Liza Pullman brought her class from the Bronx Guild High School over to the studio this afternoon for a visit during their field trip to Philadelphia. Some of her students are also past and future participants of GreenFab, a project-based education initiative at the Bronx Guild which, “…seeks to help participants develop technological fluency and provide opportunities for applying creativity, problem-solving, and innovation to a variety of STEM based projects.”

Thanks to all the students for coming by, we hope you enjoyed the visit!

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Tom’s octo-door was installed this week. Concept through design through prototyping through final install took less than a month. The door is made of a custom steel frame and buck with multiple layers of plexi that were milled on the ShopBot. The design was adapted from a raster image that Tom converted into a combination of etched lines and drilled points of varying the depth to create the final image.

Each door is 9.5 ft x 3 ft.

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Point B and our work has been featured in several publications recently:

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We’re currently fabricating and installing the armature for the mesh in the Gallery. The armature and mesh form a doubly-curved surface from which artwork will be supported. While the digital models have provide a lot of important information for the fabrication of individual armature and mesh components, we have also put the models to use to generate information we are using for the assembly and on-site construction.

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Point B has been involved with a research team at Temple University led by Asst Professors Sneha Patel and Rashida Ng to provide consulting and design development services for a project entitled “The Integration of Paraffin-based Phase Change Material within ReD [a Responsive Daylighting Panel].”

The project is supported by a Green Building Alliance Product Innovation Grant awarded in July 2008. Project Partners: Dr. Amy Fleischer [Associate Professor, Mechanical Engineering at Villanova University], Rashida Ng [Assistant Professor, Architecture at Temple University], and Dr. Jon Zuo [President and Chief Technical Officer, Advanced Cooling Technologies].

We helped Sneha and her team by using a touch-probe module for our Shop-Bot to scan an egg-shaped physical model which acted as the geometric primitive which was arrayed across a daylighting panel. We then used input from the research team to build digital surface models from which we generated tool paths for the fabrication of molds in which the PCM (phase-change material) was formed.

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