T_ADS Obuchi Lab is the Master of Engineering in Architecture and Urbanism course at the University of Tokyo. Obuchi Lab is dedicated to the research on the emergence of global network society and its effect on architecture, urbanism and design culture. It is an interdisciplinary experimental design research laboratory connecting architecture, engineering and computations to theorize and to develop design proposals for the contemporary environments.
Saturday 2 July 2011
Stick team - a work-in-progress video
This video shows the current state of our Stick team's project. Their ambition is to develop a manufacturing system that integrates the potential of mass-production, which optimises efficiency in terms of the amount of material and production time, and the logic of mass-customisation, which maximises the possible variations in terms of formal outputs. Their project explores the issue of discarded logs in forests in Japan. Due to the increase in cheap lumbers being imported from Europe and North America, Japanese forest industry has lost its grip on competitive global lumber markets. As a result, many forests have now become abandoned causing problems for both their economy and ecosystem. The project also aims to bridge a link between Japan's wood working traditions and computational fabrication techniques.
This project is built on Frei Otto's experiment on Form-Finding, which is a formal and structural optimisation process based on material's inherent distributional logic.