Seatac Airport Sculpture
// nfo
Seatac Airport, Seattle, Washington
“Boundary”, by John Grade
2018
// role
design computation
fabrication automation
// tech
Rhino, Grasshopper
// status
under construction
// key activites
Automation of all drawing production from arbitrary 3d model
// description
John Grade is an internationally renowned sculptor who I met through a friend and colleague at Open Studio. I had the opportunity to tour his warehouse workshop and see some of the large-scale sculpture work that he and his team were undertaking using traditional wood-working techniques.
After some discussion it became apparent that I could help automate a significant portion of the manual labor associated with generating the drawing set for the production of Boundary, a large scale work to be installed in the Seattle airport. As part of a freelance contract, I built an interactive fabrication automation tool that analyzed the 3d model they had built and automated the generation of the cutting templates used in their fabrication process.
The interface includes error checking for misaligned geometry, deflection of the model beyond construction tolerances, and a visual explorer for the geometry associated with each drawing set.
The algorithm saved them hundreds of hours of labor in production.