Acrylic Mountains
When asked by a photography friend to design a wedding altar that would double as a backdrop for photography sessions, allusion to mountain-scapes and the large, singular pine trees throughout their land provided inspiration. A series of conical forms of various heights and directions were conceived of as a family that could exist together, in multiple configurations, or individually as follies across the land.
Acrylic Mountains
The cones are constructed by and alluded to through digital fabrication 101: a waffle structure of 2D contours created through CNC routing. Rather than focusing on the novelty of the fabrication process, the design seeks to explore ways an increasingly-ubiquitous construction process could yield intriguing aesthetic effects, namely through the use of acrylic sheets that are almost completely transparent yet create diffusion through layering and incident.
Preliminary Design Schemes:
The CNC process also makes customized etching and carving quite simple, and each sheet receives a custom “tattoo” of wood’grain hatch pattern, which plays on layering, incident, and translucency through a playful and ironic misuse of disciplinary convention: the wood-grain hatch also alludes to more “natural” objects like mountains and trees despite the seemingly artificiality of plastic platonics. More to come.
