These images depict this week’s design effort, an LED light fixture prototype tightly wrapped in silk formed from 3D printed plastic  and  laser-cut wood.  Yes, architects are dreamers; and who doesn’t love an awesome Section Drawing!  But we are also practical rationalists who are constrained by notions of buildability.  Knowing that these unexpected shapes can be easily formed via digital means in a prototyping facility freed us from the “tyranny of the grid”, allowing us to explore an organic, fluid design vocabulary.

These explorations play an important role at Fisher ARCHitecture, providing fertile ground for future efforts.  It would be exciting to take these forms to the next level and build them at scale in such a way that you could truly  experience them from within!  As I’ve written before, working at a small scale like this is a great way to learn skills and continue to develop our design sensibility.

OK, we need to say that it DID occur to Bea and me as we were designing our light fixture prototype that the fixture enclosure shape and its lights resembled a giant pea pod…  We felt alright about that connection because the fixture’s intended future location will be in our kitchen (as depicted below). In fact we even called attention to that relationship after the fact with the inevitable design name.  However, the resemblance is purely by chance. Our primary concern was designing an efficient shape for housing the lights, and differentiating the project structure and innards from it’s smooth skin.

For recent full size Fisher ARCHitecture parametric architecture designs, check out Jan Loney’s studio here, and our “513 Court Place” project here.