3 d chapter 9 forming and fabrication

CHAPTER 9 FORMING AND FABRICATION

IntroductionMaking

Martin Puryear. Installation view of exhibition, "Martin Puryear" November 4, 2007 through January 14, 2008. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Two especially significant aspects of making involve • Process – for example, squeezing clay in your hands versus welding steel together.• Thinking – for example, drawing or gluing wood together leads to idea development.

Additive processes involve taking material and adding other material until it takes the desired form —a face, a sphere, a building or an invented form, for example.

Additive materials can include: • Clay (accretion relies on

adding small bits to an armature until the form is complete.)

• Wax• Plaster• Metals (welded, brazed,

riveted or soldered)• Architectural materials such

as bricks and concrete

Basic FormingAdditive

Alberto Giacometti. Dog.c. 1951. Bronze (cast 1957).

The subtractive process allows us to make things not by adding or attaching, but by removing material. Carving is the most common subtractive fabrication process, but it is not the only one.

Giuseppe Penone at work on an Atlas cedar weighing 5 tons.

Basic FormingSubtractive

Giuseppe Penone sculpture at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

In the Gordon Matta-Clark installation/intervention, he cut a series of circles out of the shell of an abandoned house, a subtractive process that does not involve traditional carving. Matta-Clark made Conical Intersect with industrial saws, creating a kind of poetic, partial demolition that produced startling vistas by literally punching holes in the domestic domain.

Faux food. Iwasaki Images of America.

Basic FormingSubtractive

Gordon Matta-Clark. Conical Intersect. 1975.

Julio Gonzalez. Maternity. 1934.

The constructive process involves addition and subtraction, but it does not involve the traditional methods of modeling and carving. Constructive making involves joinery—it is a process of adding and adjusting elements that are ultimately fixed in place to form a structure.

To form a sculpture, product, or building, these elements are usually:• Welded• Fastened mechanically• Glued together

Basic FormingConstructive

Basic FormingConstructive

The industrial process of welding to create sculpture took full advantage of the basic materials of metal rods, beams, and planes, and the newfound freedom of welded joinery. Welding and oxy-fuel metal cutting were perfectly suited to the constructive process and contributed to thegrowing excitement about abstraction. Anthony Caro. Early One Morning. 1962.

One of the most recent manifestations of the found object is Damien Hirst’s thirteen-foot tiger shark in a tank containing formaldehyde, here installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Concerning context and the found object, Roberta Smith wrote in the New York Times, “… at the Met, of course, it still shocks. If you passed it at the American Museum of Natural History across Central Park, you might not look twice.”

The Found ObjectThe ReadymadeIn the early 1900s Marcel Duchamp claimed various objects to be works of art. This simple act has dramatically impacted the art world for a century.

Damien Hirst. The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Installed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. 1991.

The combination of two or more found objects is often referred to as an altered or assisted Readymade.

What is responsible for a work such as Picasso’s Bull’s Head assemblage?

It is neither skill nor hard work. It is an intellect that makes creative connections, discovering new meaning in that which has been discarded and overlooked.

Pablo Picasso. Bull’s Head. Assemblage, bicycle seat and handlebars.1' 1 1⁄2” x 1’ x 7 1⁄2".

The Found ObjectThe Altered Readymade and the Bricolage

A bricoleur is someone who tinkers or putters about. Bricolage is generally used to describe a constructed object that is made with only materials at hand, regardless of their origin or purpose. The bricoleur is clever, proficient at combining preexisting things in new ways.

Joseph Cornell. Medici Slot Machine. 1942. Construction.1' 3 1⁄2” x 1’ x 4 3⁄8”..


Joseph Cornell’s studio, Utopia Parkway, Queens, NY.

Many designers and D.I.Y. practitioners are repurposing existing objects and utilizing found and discarded wood and metals instead of using new resources.

The interest in ordinary and discarded objects is growing, primarily because of the idea of reuse, an aspect of green design.

Clare and Harry Richardson. Committee Design. Surprise(lamp). 2010.


I am for an art that is political-erotical-mystical,that does something other than sit on its ass in amuseum. . . —Claes Oldenburg

• Edgar Degas challenged the conventions of traditional figure sculpture by dressing his bronze figure in an actual cloth.

• Allan Kaprow created Happenings in the 1970s, performance-like activities in which the artist gave his full attention to ordinary, ephemeral life experiences, attempting to raise them to a plateau of intensified awareness.

Edgar Degas. The Little Fourteen Year Old Dancer. Bronze (cast 1932), cloth dress and ribbon. Representing Marie van Goethem. H. 3' 1⁄2” x 1 1⁄6’ x 9 1⁄2".

Bridging Art and LifeArt and Everyday Experience

Bridging Art and LifeArt and Everyday Experience

Relational aesthetics view the artist as a catalyst of social experiences.

Less than a hundred years ago livestock were part of daily life; today they are invisible. The Virtual Pasture was an artwork installed on the campus of The Ohio State University.

The introduction of sheep to a university campus is more than surreal juxtaposition; it is a proposal for a balanced life.

Hybrid FormBlurring BoundariesMany contemporary artists, designers, and architects utilize hybrid form. • They feel free to use various

styles and media within a single work, and they don’t worry if the work is called sculpture, painting, or design.

• It’s not that working within disciplinary boundaries is no longer useful; it’s just that it is no longer obligatory.

• The Tim Hawkinson work is sculpture, musical instrument, installation, and an experience of sound.

Tim Hawkinson. Überorgan. 2000. Woven polyethylene, nylon net, cardboard, tubing, and various mechanical components. Size, variable.

A very different kind of hybrid object exists in the realm of contemporary electronic products—it involves combining functions that previously existed as separate products.

This hybrid tendency in electronic product design is referred to as convergence.

Hybrid FormBlurring Boundaries

Apple iPhone.

Industrial MethodsThe Machine Aesthetic

Machines appear to me, more than books, statues, paintings, to be works of the imagination.

-- Octave Mirbeau

Machines and machine-made things have their own kind of beauty, and it is a new beauty for our time—the machine aesthetic has many devotees.

Jean Prouvé. Antony Chair. 1950.

Mark di Suvero. Sea Change. 1995. San Francisco, California.

Computer Aided Design

The Future is Here The complex biomorphic forms of architecture today could not have been made without Computer Aided Design (CAD)

Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao Museum was designed and constructed using CAITA (Computer Aided Three-dimensional Interactive Application.) These programs keep track of every part, determine structural requirements, and monitor all components and their dimensions.

Frank Gehry. Guggenheim Museum. Bilbao, Spain. 1997.

Computer Aided Design

The Future is HereArtists also use CAD technology. Karin Sander used a laser scanner to provide relevant data and a rapid prototyper to transfer that data into actual 3D plastic figures.

These portraits, made entirely by mechanical means, but they provide us with likenesses that were previously obtainable only by means of an observer who engaged in the act of recreating observed form with skilled hands.

Karin Sander. 3D Bodyscan of the living person. FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling), Rapid Prototyping, ABS (Acryl-Butadien-Nityl-Styrol), AirbrushLeft: Annemarie Becker 1:10, 1999. Size ca. 17 cm, Center: Georg Winter 1:10, 1998. Size ca. 18 cm, Right: Dr. Ulla Klippel 1:10, 1999

Replication TechniquesBasic and Traditional

Jigs are simple devices that serve as guides for cutting, drilling, and other forming methods.

This device is a rudimentary jig that allows the user to cut equal-length boards, endlessly, eliminating the need to measure every length of wood.

Sizing board jig for crosscut plan.


The most common process for recreating three-dimensional form involves casting and mold making. Mold making can get very complex, with multiple parts that might be required to avoid undercuts (shapes that would resist removal from the mold.)

Molds are commonly made from original works created in clay of materials such as:• Plaster• Latex• Silicone rubber

Eva Zeisel. Tomorrow’s Classic. Hall China teapot and mold. 1952.


To make a cast, the molds can be filled with various materials:• Slip (liquid clay)• Plaster• Metals• Wax• Resin

Traditional bronze sculpture is often created with the lost wax process:

• A one-piece ceramic shell mold that contains the original wax pattern.• After the wax is melted out in an oven, molten bronze is poured into the mold,

hardening as it cools. • The ceramic shell is then cracked off the encased bronze, revealing the sculpture.

Molten steel being poured into a mold.

Replication TechniquesNew Approaches

Rapid prototyping (also referred to as 3D printing) is an additive process in which digital instructions control a computerized printing device that deposits a material (usually plastic), layer upon layer, until the full three-dimensional object is complete.The initial design input can be either digitally created with CAD software or by laser scanning an original object.

Toy horse duplicate in a Dimension SST 3D printer at Virginia Commonwealth University, Sculpture Department (left). The SST printer uses a processcalled fused deposition modeling. Original black toy horse and green duplicate made by 3D printing (right). Photograph: R. Eric McMaster.

Laser CuttingComputerized laser cutters allow for CAD data to control cutting flat shapes in numerous materials. The advantages of laser cutting are accuracy and the freedom to fabricate either one object or one hundred, all from the original digital input.

The CNC RouterA CNC (computer numerical control)router is a machine that removes materials such as plastic, foam, wood, and aluminum by virtue of a spinning router bit that moves on three or more axes.

Replication TechniquesNew Approaches

Shopbot PRS Standard CNC router with foam figure at Virginia Commonwealth University,Sculpture Department. Photograph: R. Eric McMaster.

Replication Techniques New ApproachesThe C2 Solid Chair at left is fabricated by

means of the stereolithography process, in which a computer-controlled laser heats and solidifies a photosensitive epoxy resin.

The Cinderella Table below was fabricated by a CNC router. Fifty-seven individual sections were formed by the router, then pieced together to complete the table.

Patrick Jouin. C2 Solid Chair. 2004. Epoxy resin, 2' 6 7⁄8” x 1' 3 7⁄8” x 1' 9 1⁄4". Manufactured by Materialise NV.

Jeroen Verhoeven. Cinderella Table. Manufactured by Demakersvan. 2004. Birch. 2’ 7 1⁄2” x 4’ 4” x 3’ 4".