Workshop @Cemex Global RD #2
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Studio Robert Stuart-Smith, Weitzman School of Design | University of Pennsylvania
Collaborating Partner: Cemex Global Research HQ, Switzerland
TA: Musab Badahdah
701 M.Arch Design Studio
Students: Akarsh Sabhaney, Cai Zhang, Dongyun Kim, Hao Zeng, Lingyun Yang, Mo Shen, Qi Liu, Rui Huang, Sihan Zhu, Xiaoyi Peng, Yuting Qian, Zhaoyi Liu
During travel week Penn's 701 Studio Stuart-Smith travelled to Biel, Switzerland to undertake a workshop with Cemex Global R&D. Workshops commence with students learning about Cemex’s self-compacting concrete products first hand, mixing various mixtures and experimenting with castings. Students work in groups to develop a concept for an experimental fabrication prototype in collaboration with Cemex, and then set about fabricating molds, casting and de-molding prototypes in parallel to preparing a digital presentation that is presented to the Cemex team on the final day of the workshop. While the workshop is extremely fast paced, students have learnt a lot and achieved innovative results in short time-frames.
Design via Prototyping:
The emphasis of the workshop is on creative development of the concrete manufacturing process in order to arrive at design propositions through prototypical experiments. This involved experimentation with the fabrication process, leveraging: material mixture, material dynamics and formwork methods, in order to develop novel ideas for the use and design of concrete, integrating the material and manufacturing method as intrinsic properties of design proposals.
