Power and cooperation

Power and cooperation

September 2, 2021 by LAM staff

Philadelphia sculptor Miguel Horn’s latest work may not seem particularly technological, but it is the result of sophisticated design and creativity that many landscape architects can realize. ContraFuerte This is a new permanent installation set that will be unveiled this fall. “The common action is a monument,” says Horn.

The installation contains a strong component of the discovery. Located 12th Street directly from the center of the city, on the street from the Central Terminal Market in the center of the city, the sculpture depicts two men and a woman tied together like a small bridge, with the supernatural hanging from the bridge. Road. To implement and install the project – weighing 11,000 pounds and weighing more than 5,000 complex aluminum pieces – Horn turned to design software skills and invited longtime friend Chris Landow, a partner at ASLA, a design technologist with a newly established unknown company. To cooperate.

He spent 11 years in Olin, working with landscape architects on some high-profile projects, including Landwood Delworth Park. He is fluent in a wide range of visual aids and digital devices in design offices, including rhinoceros and grapefruit. That efficiency, along with the experience of producing landscape models, went straight to reality ContraFuerte.

The original digital application of the installation gives a sense of size and the surrounding environment. Image courtesy Miguel Horn.

The monument was erected about five years ago. He used the horn bridge – the small concrete staircase to the parking garage – and LiDAR scans to capture the surrounding buildings. He then made a 1: 3 scale model of the entire piece of clay and foam. Then he used that model, his life scale, again LiDAR. To clear the scan (e.g., fingerprint correction) In To the wall On He and Landa learned ZBrush, a digital melting software tool that delivers in-depth information and other details. But the scope of the project still requires high accuracy.

Almost all horn work is symbolic. He developed what he described as a “landscape construction method, stacking sheet materials to construct a three-dimensional shape.” For the first time, however, a piece had to be digitally built. And I needed tools [to assure] There are no gaps in it. ” Each layer had to be stacked up to eight inches above the top and bottom – for hundreds of layers.

Above, the studio view during the assembly process shows both halves at different stages of completion. Image courtesy Miguel Horn.

“Grass was used to automatically cover each cover,” Landau said. “Landscaping is how I did my job for years. We had at least a dozen [custom scripted] Pure output as much as possible in Grasshopper. Landau used a baking process, built in sarshop and wrote code more than once. “Technology has shaped geometry,” it says. He also added the necessary hardware — bolts, displays, vibrators, and three-dimensional lockers — in the statue that connects the layers to the bridge and the wall. The software not only simplifies the shape of the sculpture and the urban environment, it also creates the algorithm to efficiently store thousands of shapes in hundreds of feet by four feet by 10 feet — preparing design pieces on fabric to reduce residues — by cutting them into jets. The eight superheroes then came back to life using a 3D model of one of the pieces in a piece-by-piece collection.

The expansion of computer-based industrial processes is two-pronged: it accelerates mass production, but at the same time reduces the need to design and implement buildings and other projects for public spaces. Statues and architecture are different, says Horn. “Artists like Chris and [me] Other artists are working to integrate technology into the arts so that they can take their place in the design of our built environment.

Sculptor Miguel Horn collects the first half ContraFuerte In his West Philadelphia studio. Image courtesy Miguel Horn.