Last night, the smallest construction site was in operation from 11:15-11:35pm. Some of my thesis studiomates had a good laugh at this process. It just seemed so ... real yet fake. I was working with "real" materials, yet in such miniscule quantities that it was more akin to doling out medication doses than cubic meters of construction matter.
Welcome to my studio-turn-production center. Maybe it seems silly, but I wanted to do a (literally) little test of a recycled concrete mix design, what material is best used for formwork, and what release agent is ideal for the process. Scaling a building panel down to 1/10th its size meant that each piece was roughly the size of a credit card. How much will I learn from it? Well, it's something. The concrete is still curing. In the meantime, I made this stilted animation courtesy of Phil's smart phone and a little bit of Photoshop* :
* while I figure out how to upload animated GIF files to this blog -
a subject that many a blogger has struggled over but have not come up with a simple solution -
click on the photo for now to see the animation.
It involved mixing concrete using the following essential ingredients:
- cement = Quikrete (because I don't have time for the real 7 day cure)
- large aggregate = gravel from Killian Court as "scaled rubble"
- fine aggregate = playground sand
- water = taken from the women's bathroom
- work area tarp = trash bag
- work gloves = latex-free gloves from the fab lab
- release agent = WD-40 (a real release agent, but perhaps too powerful for corrugated cardboard)
In any rate, more experimentation to come as our thesis midreview looms!
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