I’m happy to announce a project I’ve been involved in for quite some time. A 170 meter long bench that will be installed in 4 parts in Amsterdam Houthavenpark (the Netherlands). The first 20 meter part has been recently installed. It’s constructed from 8mm lasercut steel plates.
The bench looks deceptively simple, but getting this up to production level was far from straightforward.
The bench has been completely parametrized into a grasshopper script except for the 4 x 5 input curves that describe the shape of the complete bench. Some details of the design:
The backside parts of the modules begin behind the front, then level at seating level and then disappear again behind the front blue parts. Backsides are 5 degrees tilted to form an interesting dynamic pattern.
All yellow parts are unique parts that are generated based on the positions of the concrete blocks that were installed long before the completion of the benches. These were measured twice (to monitor significant movement which is no luxury in Amsterdam) and measurement data was loaded into grasshopper to evaluate the exact distances. This enabled us to install the bench relatively flat on the concrete blocks that have significant height and tilt differences:
The ends of the bench become smaller and wider in a fluent transition.
An early visualization I made during the development:
All 2d drawings we generated based on a special version of the model that allowed me to take bend factors into consideration. Bend factors were determined based on early tests as they change significantly with bend radius. The generation of these 2d production drawings was in fact more complex part of the script to get working flawlessly than the 3d drawings.
The end script has become huge with over 5000 components, but I still found it to be relatively manageable. The longest benches take around 20 minutes to calculate all aspects of the bench part.
Credits:
Design: Studio Wessels Boer
Photography: Willem Sluyterman van Loo
Engineering: Instaal BV / StudioGijs
Grasshopper scripting production model: StudioGijs
V-Ray visualization: StudioGijs