Algorithmic Casting

Project Team: Jeff Maeshiro, Jia Wu
Advisor: Andrew Kudless (MATSYS), California College of the Arts
Location: San Francisco, California, USA
Year: 2013

Digital fabrication and Grasshopper guru Andrew Kudless‘ Generative Design seminar utilizes parametric design thinking to enhance digital fabrication and casting techniques to foster avenues of exploration. By connecting Grasshopper to CNC mold making and plaster casting complex geometries that conform to their own internal logics can be discovered and endlessly iterated.

When these ideas are applied to tessellated pattern making the mold edges become important. When the mold meets the edge at a tangent the tessellation becomes seamless. This led to a process, inspired by casting tips by Exlab, of heat slumping PETG over movable pegs while sandwiched between a fixed, symmetrical set of edges, creating and repeatable pattern of tiles to fill a wall with undulating, beckoning surfaces.