Zero/Fold

source: highlike

Work: Date: 2010 Size: 10′ x 10′ x 3′ Location: Kasian Gallery, University of Calgary, Canada Description: Although digital fabrication has allowed architects and designers to explore more complex geometries, one of the byproducts has been a lack of attention to material waste. Often digitally fabricated projects are generated from a top-down logic with the parameters of typical material sheet sizes being subordinated to the end of the design process. This project attempts to reverse that logic by starting from the basic material dimensions and then generating a series of components that will minimize material waste during CNC cutting while still producing an undulating, light-filtering screen in the gallery.
Photographer: Andrew Kudless
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source: matsysdesign

Matsys
Established in 2004 by Andrew Kudless, Matsys is a design studio that explores the emergent relationships between architecture, engineering, biology, and computation. Based on the idea that architecture can be understood as a material body with its own intrinsic and extrinsic forces relating to form, growth, and behavior, the studio investigates methodologies of performative integration through geometric and material differentiation. The studio’s work ranges from speculative and built projects to the crafting of new tools which facilitate an interdisciplinary approach to the design and fabrication of architecture.
Bio
Andrew Kudless is an architect based in San Francisco where he is an associate professor at the California College of the Arts. Andrew has taught design studios, workshops, and seminars at The Ohio State University, the Architectural Association (London), Yale University, and Rice University. In 2005 Andrew was the Howard E. LeFevre Fellow for Emerging Practitioners at OSU. He earned a Master of Arts with distinction from the Architectural Association’s Emergent Technologies and Design graduate program and a Master of Architecture with honors from the Tulane University School of Architecture. In 2004 he was the recipient of a Design Merit Award in the Far Eastern International Digital Architecture Design (FEIDAD) competition and in 1998 he was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to research architectural design and urbanism in the Kansai region of Japan. He has worked as a designer for Allied Works Architecture in Portland and New York and as a digital design, modeling, and fabrication consultant for Expedition Engineering in London. Andrew’s work has been exhibited in the US, England, France, Japan and China.
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source: biomimetic-architecture

MATSYS architecture are a brilliant design house that delve into emergent design and digital fabrication like none other, we have a very popular article about their Honeycomb Morphologies project here as well. Their newest post is about the Zero Fold Screen. Whereas digital fabrication often opens up the door to new designs and efficient use of time, it often equally results in a waste of resources, with small pieces cut into large panels with much waste. Zero Fold starts backwards, the design of the shading curtain began with the available dimensions of the raw panel and the algorithm applied seemingly aimed to create efficient undulation to make the most use of that very panel. Design on a dime if you will…much more pictures in the rest of the post…

Below is a diagram showing how the panel was divided to reduce the spaces in between the different panels without being mundane or repetitive.