...Now came the geometric by-play of these charming checkered colour combinations! The structural figues to be made with peas and small straight sticks; slender constructions, the jointings accented by the little green pea-globes. The smooth shapely maple blocks with which to build, the sense of which never afterwards leaves the fingers: so form became feeling . And the box with a mast to set upon it, on which to hang with string the maple cubes and spheres and triangles, revolving them to discover subordinate forms...
...That early kindergarten experience with the straight line; the flat plane; the square; the triangle; the circle! If I wanted more, the square modified by the triangle gave the hexagon -- the circle modified by the straight line would give the octagon. Adding thickness, getting 'sculpture' thereby, the square became the cube, the triangle the tetrahedron, the circle the sphere. These primary forms and figures were the secret of all effects... which were ever got into the architecture of the world...
Frank Lloyd Wright, from An Autobiography
Assignment One uses, as a point of departure, the famous kindergarten construction blocks that inspired Frank Lloyd Wright. Use the simplest geometrical primitives, specifically rectangular prisms, to investigate the power of the copy, translate, rotate and scale procedures. Create a structure which, had it been created and preserved in Froebel blocks by the infant Frank Lloyd Wright, would have been described by later architectural historians as "eerily premonitory of one of Wright's lesser-known masterpieces, the _________ ..."
Follow through by using shape editing techniques at different topological levels (point, segment, plane) to adjust the volumes, as discussed in class. In other words, edit your objects by selecting a topological level such as segment, selecting a segment, and using transformation commands such as move, rotate, or scale.
Experiment with the various levels of rendering and the shadow-casting option. Save several viewing positions with the Views Palette. There is no need to print the results (for the CAD class) since all work will be submitted electronically to the Web site.
The result does not have to represent a building; it could be furniture, stained-glass, etc... You might approach this exercise in either of two ways: analyze a work of Wright, reducing its mass to a collection of rectangular prismatic solids; or construct and further develop one of the arrangements of Froebel blocks sketched here...
Requirements:
One color, perspective image at 640 x 480 pixels, properly named and submitted as a JPG file to the class directory on the New York server. If your name were Jane Jones, you would submit a file named: jones.jane.a1.1.jpg
The image should include a small text label, created in Photoshop, which includes your name.
Due date:
Due by 10:00 PM Friday, June 14. These will be shown during class Tuesday June 18.
Remember to save your form-Z file on a floppy disk, and in a personal folder in the Public directory on the New York server. Remember to name your folder with your full last name, and first name, e.g.: jones.jane
Note that some summer studios will be coordinating sketch problems with the CAD class. We will discuss in class what can be submitted for CAD assignments, if this is the case.
Class 1 (Thursday, June 6, '96): Topics: Administrative: Instructors Eden Muir Rory O'Neill Danille Smoller Eric Liftin DAs Laura Reuwee David Ruy Andreas Froech Steven Chen Lawrence Shum TAs Phil Anzalone Cory Clarke Namho Park System Administrator Jim Wise Assistant System Administrator Alex Dimitriu The Digital Initiative at the GSAP DDL and the CAD Sequence Intro and Advanced Credits, Waivers, Grades Macintosh and Silicon Graphics Hardware and Software The Network (Phil) Using the "new York" Server Coordination with Studio Security, Deposits, Access, Accounts, Fees Netscape Surfing the Web Slides The Mask (Softimage) The Network, The Web, The Internet Interactive TV, Spatial Interfaces Myst Digital Design, Paperless Studio Rapid Prototyping, Finite Element Analysis Stereo Lithography Virtual Reality, Data Gloves Form-Z Interface Points, Vectors, Polygons Vertex/Vertices Topological Levels Basic Modeling Views Form-Z Slides Asplund, Stockholm Library Mies, Brick Villa Wright, Table Wright, Unity Temple (LightScape Graphics)