STUDIO ARC300: THIRD YEAR DESIGN
University of Kansas, School of Architecture and Urban Design
Nils Gore, Assistant Professor

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Micki Prinster

the perfectly crooked line- character, articulation, production

Trying to describe the essence of my box starts by first uncovering its characteristics. Most cardboard is made up of essentially three layers- two flat and thin of a rough brown paper sandwiching a layer of corrugated paper of the same material. This mixture when separate simply has the properties of and acts like what it is, paper. But together the three become this fabric that takes on a completely new life. Cardboard is not homogenous- not all pieces are made alike. It comes in varying degrees of thickness and strength. Cardboard is flexible, but does not bend easily in a straight line, and when it is bent, it wrinkles. Some pulls apart easily and others have layers that are glued together firmly. Cardboard is easy to cut with an Exacto blade or knife, a little more difficult with scissors. Cardboard is not water-resistant, and when wet, it soaks up the moisture becoming soggy. Once dry, it stains and is warped. The exterior layers of the cardboard might have some type of finish on them helping to repel small amounts of water, protecting their contents. As a result, some pieces are difficult to glue together. In summary, cardboard is not uniform and it is not perfect. How can one strive to achieve perfection in building when being asked to use such a material? The result is the perfectly imperfect box.

First tries at the task of making a box were a struggle because I was attempting to make all of the sides line up even and straight. The pieces were cut by human hand, not by laser. They did not all have ninety-degree angles and parallel sides. The nature of the cardboard as well as human imprecision presented these problems. Only with precise instruments could one make an exact cube. I realized that the box would never look right no matter how much time and effort I put into the construction. I do not have perfect craft and cardboard does not help this obstacle. Human limitations are my limitations. What I first created was something that appeared sloppy and obviously of poor craft, not because it was built haphazardly and quickly, but because perfection could never be achieved. Consequently rather than using six twelve inch by twelve inch pieces and trying to fit them all together exactly along their edges, I moved toward the idea of patchwork to achieve the one foot volume size.

Using an assortment of smaller pieces creates the image of the object as a jumble of things joined together, thus taking the eye away from the “flaws” by creating obvious, intentional flaws. The idea is to not let the eye even try to see perfection. The inherent randomness and articulation become the creativity of the piece. No two boxes of this type of production will ever be the same. I could never duplicate the recipe nor could anyone else- the method of production yes, but never the outcome. This is the key to making the perfectly crooked line.

Now, the focus shifted to strive for the perfection in the system. Try to make the production be the masterpiece. Using rules or a system to create a random, imperfect outcome seems almost like a contradiction. The production of the box became a subject of economy in both labor and materials used. Systematic prefabrication of the pieces results in a more economic production. Less time on producing parts means more energy into the creativity of the work. Using a large sheet of cardboard, I laid out various piece sizes making six of each size, one for each side of the box. There was no set amount of these; I just cut until it looked like there was enough. All have slits cut in them so that you could join any piece with another, giving a high amount of versatility. Fewer cuts have to be made in this method than in making each piece individually as a result of abutting pieces. One cut can produce two slits or two edges. By having piles of pieces each for a designated side made it easier to select pieces to add to the sculpture; less searching and room for creativity due to the excess.

The conclusion reached by the trial of the production is to always have some unused pieces. This leaves room for error, creativity, and individuality of each side. Joining the pieces is still of your own free will. Overlap as you choose, stretch the limits of the strength of the cardboard by using the extreme least of the material possible. It is up to the creator to decide when the project is complete and perfect imperfectness is achieved.

the virtuoso vs. the bumbler- an art of workmanship.
The whirligig project was introduced as an interim project to pass time while waiting for the mud bricks, our next project, to dry. It was viewed as a fill-in more or less with the initial reaction of not being anything too serious and that we would end up owning a neat lawn ornament, with which we could decorate our yards. Just something fun to pass the time and a way to participate in a school wide project being able to compare our outcome to that of our architecture peers ranging from graduate students to freshmen. The intention of the project and the eventual results seem to be on two different planes. What the project became was an in-depth look into the subject of craft, or workmanship as David Pye names it in his book, “The Nature and Art of Workmanship.”

The character of my whirligig design grew from the movie we watched in class about Arthur Ganson and his machines. The machines in which Ganson hand made all of the gears and parts out of metal rods fascinated me. All of the pieces worked so well together that you would never have guessed that they were made by hand. Part of the movie showed Ganson actually producing one of his gears. I thought it looked easy to do and his end composition had an awesome result as not only being a machine that preformed a function, but also a work of art. My whirligig, although I did not yet know what it would “do” in the end, would be a machine with hand made gears like one of Ganson’s works that was driven by wind instead of by hand crank. To catch the wind I looked at the design of an anemometer, an object designed to spin in the wind very efficiently. Instead of the traditional cup or half sphere, I chose to use a three dimensional star. It was from this shape that the total design of the whirligig was based.

Great designs exist in the mind’s eye and are then translated to paper. It is in the next step, that of production, where the workman steps in. Design is, as Pye states in his article, “what can be conveyed in words and by drawing: workmanship is what cannot . . . no designer can make bad workmen produce good workmanship. “ In the last project, I dealt with the issue of precision verses imprecision. Although it was not intended to turn out that way, this project seemed to manifest some of the same ideals as the last. However, this time I was on the opposite side of the fence. My whirligig design called for exact precision in not only its production, but also in its articulation and final outcome.

There were two types of items that had to be hand-produced for my whirligig: the gears and the wind catching device. When I made the original test models of my device, I formed the gears by simply bending them back and forth over a hole puncher. The method was not very precise in creating uniform gears with equal tooth length, spacing, etc. In Ganson’s movie, he developed a jig to aid in making a more uniform gear. I created a jig similar to the idea of Ganson’s. With movable pegs with which to uniformly bend the teeth around, one jig can create many different size gears, a virtue that I saw as an asset to my jig. I could not however develop any type of system around which to form the circular gear shape. This seemed to hurt the design of my gears. The shape had to be formed by simply bending and estimating a round shape, a very imprecise method that I feel hurt their use later on. The gear then had to be soldered together into that shape and this made one of the teeth, the one where the soldering occurred, slightly larger than the others; again imprecision. Attaching a center tube with which the gear could be mounted to its home rod and allowed to spin upon was also difficult to be accurate. First, it was nearly impossible to place the tube in the exact center of the gear and then keep it in this precise spot while trying to solder it to the gear. By not having the tube in the exact center point, the gear will not spin on its rod in a uniform circle. Instead, its orbit will be elliptical, again hurting the efficiency of the gear. In conclusion of the gear production, while the jig may have been helpful in creating uniform tooth size, there were many other factors of imprecision in creating the gear. If these items could have jigs as well to aid their production, the workmanship could have been more toward that of certainty instead of leaning so far towards risk.

In some cases of production however, Pye states, “Rough workmanship may be excellent while precise may be bad.” Rough workmanship seemed to be very successful and an asset to the creation of the wind catching device. To create this part of the whirligig, I created four star forms out of thin wire, bending them according to the shape that I had drawn out on paper. This method was a little risky because the forms were bent with the hand and thus all could not be alike. However perfection did not seem to be an issue in catching the wind. I used plastic tablecloth attached to this form to make a three dimensional star. The star arm pieces were all precut to the same triangular shape and attached to one another and to the form by melting the plastic with a soldering iron to adhere it to itself. The pieces did not all meet exactly at the point of the star and so a very small gap was left in the back. I think the workmanship here was allowed to be rough. The triangles all had to overlap a little so that they could be fastened together. Then the fact that they did not all meet at the point allowed for some wind to pass through. I did not test to see if a completely closed star was a more efficient spinner because this method seemed to work wonderfully. Overall, I would classify the wind catcher as the workmanship of certainty that relies on rough workmanship in its production.

The workman not only has to create the pieces of the assembly, but also has to join them as a whole. Even well produced pieces will not work without successful articulation. I feel that it was the imprecision in the production of my gears that lead to my inability to assemble them in a manner that would allow them to actually work. The gears just were not uniform enough to require such precise interaction. Too much friction developed in the system as a result of the number of gears multiplied by their inability to perform smoothly together. Even with five gears, so much force is required to turn the last one, that I am unsure that even if my gears had all worked together nicely they would have been able to turn the last gear efficiently. The wind is just not reliable of supplying that much power consistently.
“Good workmanship is that which carries out or improves upon the intended design. Bad workmanship is what fails to do so and thwarts the design.” In being self critical about my project, I would conclude that overall my whirligig suffers from bad workmanship. It fails because it does not perform the function for which a whirligig exists- producing a result as a consequence of the wind blowing. The gears do not spin together unless coaxed by my hand power and even then not very smoothly. In my production I feel that the workmanship of risk is too great. To create a working whirligig of the same basic design a much greater amount of certainty needs to be introduced. I think that I would need to develop more jigs, one for every step of the gear production. Gears then should only be placed at right angles to each other in the design. Angled gears seemed to cause a great deal of placement problems. More gears create more friction, so use only the minimum number required. Do not make the “aha” of the end rely too heavily on precision. The trickle down effect greatly influences the end piece, meaning that a slight bit of imprecision in the beginning multiplies as it moves through the machine making the last piece behave very unpredictably.

There are a few successes that I can take away from this project. First is the improvement of my soldering technique. With much practice, my skill with metal on the final whirligig was drastically superior to that of the first test models. Another part that I was happy with was the wind catcher. I began with the intentions of creating a star to catch the wind, and despite objections and questions about the ability of that design to succeed, I accomplished the feat rather beautifully. Although in the end my whirligig does not perform its intended function, the aesthetics did turn out exactly as I wanted them to and on that level I feel that I was successful.