This year Michael along with Ryan Whitby worked with a group of students to produce Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture & Urban Design exhibition of student work in the Hazel and Robert H. Siegel Gallery. Each year the course produces an installation that explores digital fabrication methods as while showcasing the previous year’s student work. The opening of the exhibition coincides with In Process, the annual publication of student work. The curatorial component of the exhibition is meant to contrast the more traditional way of indexing the work through In Process.

This year’s GAUD exhibition grouped the visual work of the previous year in a large hanging installation. The collection of work takes the form of a field of hanging panels that have been precisely rotated to form a spatial catalog of the work. The panels are rotated in a way to both visually reveal and obscure slices of the work as visitors move around the floating volume forming a three dimensional lenticular effect.

The rotation of each panel is held in place through a CNC cut disk, two strings, and a weight that keeps the panel aligned. The overall form of the piece is vaulted creating cavities for visitors to explore the work as well as view the models below. By faulting the volume it not only references the gravity driven nature of the piece but also allows visitors to be immersed in the paneled volume without disturbing them.

From underneath the gradual rotation of the panels towards the apex of each vault can be seen. This pattern helps produce a visually dynamic filter of the work that comes alive as you move around it, but also frames the work in two ways: 1. The healthy turbulence that exists in the school and the work. It is the experimental nature of the school that is the common influence and thread that connects everything in the curriculum.  This turbulence can be seen as the force that exposes new conditions within the work 2. The anchors of the curriculum, studio and methodology, act as magnetic fields orienting the work in different ways. This orientation provides an extreme variety of direction, but it is the graduated precision and strong inflection points that keep even the farthest explorations within the bounds of the program.

The hanging installation was made of over 800 panels. These were each custom laser cut, assembled, and clad with custom cut images. All of the various details used to create the large volume were made out of flat parts which were laser cut or produced on a CNC mill. These parts were all generated from an overall computer model of the installation.