11 – Welding Tutorial | Make Architecture

11 – Welding Tutorial

This week we were introduced to oxy-acetylene and mig welding. welding jacket and hood required!

the oxy-acetylene tanks and dials require some specific setting up, but provide a super flexible rig for welding… outdoors, indoors, etc. This is also called stick welding since you have to feed the stick material into the weld by hand.

Here’s Charlie demonstrating the mig welder and the ideal ‘caterpillar’ type of weld one hopes to achieve….

since this week was about the tutorial, not production, i am including images of some metalwork project I have done in the past that relate to this course. Last summer, with Greg Kice of Lundberg Design, we fabricated this storefront and lighting and installed it on-site for the Restaurant Out-The-Door on Bush Street in San Francisco.

Previously, Greg Kice and I collaborated and fabricated an entrance gate for architect David Baker in San Francisco.

Finally, a conceptual ‘Reading Machine’ I designed and fabricated for a 1st year core studio project at MIT.

4.184 MAKE ARCHITECTURE

4.184 - ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN WORKSHOP:
[MAKING ARCHITECTURE] THE RESULTS
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Instructor: Nick Gelpi TA: Skylar Tibbits TA: Varvara Toulkeridou
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Class Times, Monday, 1-4pm - room 5-216
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4.184 is an intensive introduction to methods of making explored through a wide range of brief but focused 1-week exercises. We'll engage the real and leave behind representation in the focused context of this class gaining skills for utilizing a range of fabrication machines and technologies from lasercutting, waterjet, 3D printing, welding, formworking-molding, casting, gears, joints and composites.
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In this workshop we'll constrain ourselves to the territory of the 1:1. Students will represent architectural constructions at full scale and develop a more intimate relationship with technology by engaging the tools and techniques that empower us. We will gain access to the most cutting edge machines and technologies in the MARS lab at the Center for Bits and Atoms.
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The second layer of information for this course will be to look at a series of case studies in which construction methods and technologies have played a dominant role in the design process .
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Over the past 20 years, architects have focused on the technology of representation to create new ideas of what architecture could be. Looking back today, much of that research failed to substantially change the way we design buildings by focusing on apriori formal configurations. This class makes the contention that this failure comes from a lack of considerations of the potentials within fabrication knowledge. We look to the future of what building might become, given the expanded palette of personalize-able technologies available to us as architects. Students will participate in curious technological and material investigations, to discover the potentials, known and unknown, for these various technologies.
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The sub-disciplines of what's drawn and what's built have been compartmentalized and disassociated as the representational tools of architecture have distanced themselves from the techniques of making. At the same time the technologies for “making” in architecture have provided us with new possibilities for reinventing how we translate into reality, the immaterial representations of architecture.
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