Advanced Design Studies Blog: Critical Mass
Today we were pleased to welcome representatives from Taisei Corporation for a joint review in the laboratory. Professors Jun Sato and Takeo Igarashi also joined the presentations. Four teams of students presented their work and their proposals for this year’s pavilion project. There were brief Q & A sessions after each presentation.
Staff and students from Obuchi lab had the pleasure of participating in a review at ETH Zurich this March. The visit was an excellent chance for the UTokyo team to learn about the organization and activities at ETH, and an opportunity for researchers at both institutions to exchange views. PhD students and researchers from Obuchi Lab and Gramazio Kohler Research of ETH Zurich conducted a joint presentation at ETH Zurich’s newly constructed NCCR facility. Followed by the presentations, UTokyo students and researchers were given a series of demonstrations of robotic applications in digital fabrications.
On Monday, March 20, we were pleased to participate in a joint studio review at Itsuko Hasegawa’s gallery. The event, organized by TーADS, brought together five universities: Princeton University, Washington University, Tsinghua University, Nagoya Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo. Hasegawa gave a keynote talk at the beginning of the review.
Our first years recently went on a field trip with their Japanese Architecture and Cities class to Kyu Asakura House in the Daikanyama district. The house was built in 1919 by Torajiro Asakura and survived the Great Kanto Earthquake and the Pacific War. In 2004, the House was designated as an Important Cultural Property by the Japanese government and is open to the public.
This week we held the AR Toolkit Workshop, aimed at familiarizing students with the production and usage of AR Markers. Using Processing, Grasshopper, and AR Toolkit, students developed their own markers and used cameras to detect distances and synchronize them to points in a virtual model.
Staff and students visited several islands in Japan’s Inland Sea last week in an effort to see and experience international and domestic art and design. The itinerary for the trip included Shodoshima, Inujima, Teshima, and Naoshima.
Today, we have a robot arm workshop.
We generated a series of commands for the robot arm with Rhinoceros+Grasshopper.
Then we made the robot arm cut some pieces of foam with a heat-wire.
Three projects by Obuchi Lab made into the finalist at the Real Size Thinking Competition in Tokyo.
This project, ‘Harvesting Plasticity’, uses bio-degradable plastic to create a temporary structure. A motion-tracking system was developed to position the members precisely and a custom 3d plastic extrusion tool was used to connect the members.
Three projects by Obuchi Lab made into the finalist at the Real Size Thinking Competition in Tokyo. Here is the project by Amy and Xu, a mockup of their thesis project titled Intimacy Cloud.
Structural components are made of recycled ground coffee beans, creating aromatic environment of coffee. The components are naturally fire resistance thus proving a place for smoking area.
