candelabrum 2.0

13 design context Candelabrum 2.0 rose from the desire to abandon traditional standards and take advantage of new media to investigate the relation between abstract drawing and physical realization. In the case of Candelabrum 2.0, the absence of a client’s need established a deliberate open design exercise in which spatial insights, limited only by structural bounds and fabrication’s restrictions, were investigated with a great deal of freedom. Three crucial aspirations induced the conception of the wooden joinery system. First of all the will to ﬁnd a light-weight component able to enclose space, secondly the decision to resolve a dry connection by simply avoiding the use of screws, glues and needles and ﬁnally the obligation to deal with the intrinsic impositions of a two- dimensional milling machine capacity. All these guidelines shaped the two main typologies of components with perpen- dicular cross halving fastening, a horizontal “star” always parallel to the ground and a vertical “stick” always connecting the previous ones. Despite the use of an orthogo- nal arrangement, the 360 degrees of horizontal freedom combined with the 90 degrees of vertical inclination gave birth to an endless number of solutions. The dis- tinctive look of the ﬁnal picture appeared from the consolidation of those two ingre- dients in combination with the luminescent pattern of the third one, white candles. The introduction of a so called “point cloud” as main design strategy was used for the sculptural deformation of the composition. Such cloud, within a three-di- mensional software, represents a collection of coordinates with x,y,z information. In Candelabrum 2.0 every point symbolized a “star” component with a candle in the middle always connected to the three closest points beneath it. The possibility of freely moving points in space within a stable system allowed every creative to easily investigate his or her imagination. Working with these algorithm techniques, able to generate an inﬁnite number of out- comes in a short time, forced a break with traditional methodologies. A more evo- lutionary approach emerged, where designers constantly had to evolve sequences coming from fellow participants, creating a vast catalog of possibilities. The ﬁnal methodology was a cross-breeding of different personalities avoiding, therefore, ﬁxation and uni-later views. Architects are no longer bound to a “single” solution but they rather inﬂuence each others to articulate the full potential of digital realities. With these guidelines, the participants could develop hundreds of designs in just few days. Successful solutions got chosen based on structural integrity, material costs and fabrication time along with aesthetic values of spatial quality and contextual understanding.

candelabrum 2.0

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