PROTOTYPE: LEGS
Associate Professor Igor Siddiqui
This exhibition featured a collection of wildly reimagined table legs from Igor Siddiqui's Prototype seminar, which "explores the value of full-scale fabrication not as a final delivery method, but rather as a set of techniques through which design intent is articulated, questioned, and refined."
"In some ways architecture is about making things stand up and it is often said that if an idea is good it has legs. This academic year the seminar Prototype focused on the table leg as both an element with tangible structural properties and a prompt for generating some ideas about design in the age of mass-customization. The semester-long project was to design a parametrically differentiated series of legs, each 28” in height and with the minimum load-bearing capacity of 100 pounds. Four legs from the series were to be prototyped at full-scale, taking into account a range of fabrication techniques, materiality, and assembly methods. Parts were 3D-printed using biodegradable plastics; milled with 3- and 4-axis CNC-routers; cast from digitally shaped formwork; welded using CNC-bent steel; turned on a mechanical lathe; and sheathed in faux-fur. As prototypes, the objects on display allude to their potential next life as refined manufactured products, but also may abstractly suggest other possible architectural scales – from columns to high-rises."
Work from: Clayton Cain, Megan Carney, Aateka Hamad, Melody Hwang, Em Karimifar, Alex Krippner, Chloe Malek, Corey Olsen, Philip Richardson, Ben Wilde, and Eli Wood.