GlassCast

Glass­Cast is an ongo­ing research project into glass form­ing using recon­fig­urable molds

Glass is a ubiq­ui­tous part of the built envi­ron­ment today, but rarely is it seen in appli­ca­tions involv­ing cur­va­ture. This is both a result of the com­plex­i­ties of work­ing with such a sen­si­tive mate­r­ial, and the high cost of tool­ing and the form­ing processes required to con­trol its shape.  Con­tem­po­rary design is mov­ing towards a more per­for­mance based com­pu­ta­tional model, con­nect­ing gen­er­a­tive algo­rithms with sec­ondary and ter­tiary inputs such as envi­ron­men­tal and struc­tural per­for­mance as well as fab­ri­ca­tion and mate­r­ial con­straints. This project seeks to tie these com­plex influ­ences into one cohe­sive process, from design to fabrication.

Cen­tral to the devel­op­ment of the process was the design and fab­ri­ca­tion of a servo con­trolled recon­fig­urable glass slump­ing kiln. Based on the clas­sic “pin mold” typol­ogy, the kiln allows the rapid reshap­ing of the mold sur­face, to allow the pro­duc­tion o0f con­tin­u­ously vari­able com­po­nents from a sin­gle tool. Cou­pled with the devel­op­ment of cus­tom jig sys­tems for robotic abra­sive water­jet cut­ting, the sys­tem can pro­duce uniquely trimmed, dou­ble curved com­po­nents in stan­dard float glass. Par­al­lel to this tra­jec­tory has been the devel­op­ment of cus­tom grasshop­per com­po­nents to apro­vide the designer with instant feed­back on the lim­i­ta­tion of cur­va­ture and scale which the kiln can pro­duce. The com­po­nents then pro­duce the out­put to the kiln for the posi­tion­ing setup, which is dri­ven through a cus­tom motion controller.

The ini­tial work cul­mi­nated in a instal­la­tion which ran from Jan­u­ary to April at Lib­erty Lofts Annex, in Ann Arbor, MI.

Project Cred­its:

Lead: Wes McGee of Mat­ter Design Stu­dio and Catie Newell of Alibi Stu­dio

with Aaron Wil­lette, Lucy Ole­chowski, Bran­don Clifford

Fab­ri­ca­tion Team:

Grant Weaver, Simon Rolka, Patrick Ethen, Maciej Kaczyn­ski, Eti­enne Turpin, Andrew Stern, Brian Mus­cat, Chuck Newell

Con­sul­tant:

Steve Karnowski

This work has been funded by:

Research Through Mak­ing Grant | Taub­man Col­lege of Archi­tec­ture and Urban Planning

and

Office of the Vice Pres­i­dent of Research | Uni­ver­sity of Michigan