Open Nature | [WOOD]LE | Digital Tools

Team member(s): Jackie Williams, Ruhani Adlakha, Indraneel Joshi, Austin Brown, Nishanth Maheshwaran and Sneham Pandey
Modified by Jackie Williams on December 31, 2022

The project ‘[Wood]le’ – a ‘Wooden Noodle’ explores the idea of steam-bending tree logs to create a self stable structure. The Woodle assumes the function of a seating area as it rests on the ground at one end and folds up to become an element that frames the valley of Font Del Gos on the other.

The project was developed over a period of a month through iterative cycles of material prototyping and digital modeling & scripting to define and re-define workflow. The project’s salient feature is to connect the tree logs as an infinite loop which stabilizes and maintains the tension in the bends. The infinite loop consists of 6 members; 5 bent and 1 straight.

**Draw base rectangle -> Divide rectangle -> Move points -> Connect points -> Fillet corners -> Order curves into logs -> Create pipe**

The Grasshopper script starts with a set of control points that can be moved in all 3 axes to define the geometry of the loop. Next, the infinite loop could be further altered by varying the radii of the bends within a range of 50-120 cm, which was informed by prior research on the limits of the bending process.

Create a base **>rectangle** and divide the edges with **>divide curve; >move** the resulting points in x, y and z dimension and **>merge** them in the preferred order; draw a **>polyline** between the points

**>explode** the polyline, **>join** always two curves and **>fillet** these, **>merge** the filleted curves in the right order again

select only arch segments through **>list item** and **>join** into full arches if nesseccary (Top),
get the **>end points** of the arched segments and create straight **>line(s)** between the start points
and the **>shifted list** of end points (Bottom), cull unnesseccary lines and **>weave** the grafted list with the grafted arched segments

**>join** the pairs of arched and straight segments to get the final log curves, measure the **>lenght** of each in order to choose the actual logs from the woodyard

Changing position of control points to alter the shape of the infinite loop

After bending the logs, they were 3D scanned with the Lidar scanner of an Ipad and compared to the projected bending radii in the digital model. This method helped to adjust the bends of the logs and thus to get as close to the desired design as possible.

3D scanned logs (orange) and 3D model logs (grey)

Tags: Computational Design, Material: Wood, Landscape

Open Nature | [WOOD]LE | Digital Tools is a project of IAAC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed in the Master in Advanced Ecological Buildings & Biocities 01 - 2022-2023 by the student(s) Jackie Williams, Ruhani Adlakha, Indraneel Joshi, Austin Brown, Nishanth Maheshwaran and Sneham Pandey during the course MAEBB01 22/23 Advanced Digital Tools with Mateus Sartori.