Fabrication

Kinetic Facade
Plastic, Strings and Motors

National Chiao Tung University
2013

Kinetic Facade is an experiment project challenging the concept of digital fabrication: is it possible to assemble and disassemble a curtain wall in very short time, and this process can be repeated for many times. The ideas came from the studies of the crystallization process of ice that the elements can be disassembled by heating up the ice and the bonding between elements will be reduced; on the other hand, the bonding will be enforced when the heat is removed. This design is adopting this concept and the bonding is simulated with strings, and the power of bonding is simulated with motors. That is, when the motors are turn off, the entire curtain wall will be disassembled and it can be packed into a small space. When the motors are turn on, the strings are pulled by the motors, the tension will pull all the components together. While the strings are pulling all components together, the shapes of the components will automatically help object align with each other and every component will be in correct position. That is, the fabrication information is pre-encoded into the geometries.