[ Check the media cover of this project in Designboom, Archdaily, Archinet and MIT News ]

In 2022, Irmandy Wicaksono, the artist and project leader, formed a collective of students here at the Media Lab to apply for a Burning Man Honoraria award, which we obtained to execute the project Living Knitwork.

Since December 2022 to March 2023, we rapidly put together all needed for this big project. My tasks in this project were divided in four main topics, all of them related with the central tower and its conections to ground and the top petals:

– Overall shape design: Judy Cichocka and me converged in the design of the inner structure. We took over from the work done by Judy here at MIT based in Asymptotic Gridshells to form the central tower overal shape, consisting in 7 nodes. We optimized for structural loads and number of nodes, as the overall cost of the structure was fully dominated by the nodes (steel plates) in comparison with the beams (pine wood 2 by 4s)

– Structural Simulation:

Once we converged on a shape, I jump into AbaqusCAE and decided to calculate in detail the central structure. The load requirements were crazy. We were intalling a piece, in the desert, 6 meters tall with 12 7m long and 1m width petals (a massive sailboat) and we have to held in place under 70mph winds.

In Burningman, you cant avoid to have people to climb anything that is climbable, a fun loadcase was to have 10 heavy people at the same time randomly distributed in nodes of the structure under a 30mph wind.

If you are curious, I developed a full report of the structural calculations of the tower.

Overall the tower performed great and held pretty high winds to be fair.

– Detailed design:

Now that the shape was frezed, I decided to perform the following strategy. I designed and valudated with simulations that the nodes will never break before the beams, such as I could pay the price of more parasitic mass (we actually want inertia in our tower) in exchange of not needing to simulate again now with thousands of screws the whole tower.

I did my best to limit the type of steel and hardware needed for each connection. There were 7 different nodes, but similar enough that it could be a problem to assemble. For that I designed a cool visual rules to any installer to know inmediately by grabbing any piece where it exactly belongs. I also developed a document to assemble each node.

– Manufacturing of subcomponents:

I used SendCutSend to cut the metal and fold the thick pieces and we here at MIT folded the small belts. I designed custom jigs and tooling to drill each beam in the correct place and name them accordingly to provide location and orientation to each beam.

– Tower and petals installation:

This was a blast. I designed the connections such as the tower itself its our scafolding to climb up and keep building rings. We (somehow) got EHS approval to install this massive tower here at MIT in Laxon Lounge