~in progress~
Artist Matt Szösz hired me to assist with some of the CAD and hardware fabrication for his public art installation at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.
Matt’s design incorporates two main features, a faceted mezzanine wall glazed with Dichroic glass, flanking both sides of corridor atrium, and a hanging, winged structure with an illuminated centerpiece.
My work began with detailing the joints connecting metal framing to be laser cut for the mezzanine walls.
Photos courtesy of Matt Szösz1
Next I helped Matt rebuild and paramaterize the model for the Pentakis snub dodecahedron.
This involved creating wire frame geometry in Rhino, importing into Fusion, detailing the frame members of a ‘monomer’ section of the polyhedron, and then patterning around the various axes.
The frame required a removable access panel, so one of the ‘monomers’ was duplicated and inset to allow removal
Next I worked with Matt to spec custom cable hardware that would be used to suspend this frame, and suspend the internal lighting within the frame. This required a set of 5 types of connectors, combining different options for suspension above and below. I machined these from 303 stainless.
Next was to create a jig to allow the polyhedron frame to be welded together, along with the machined cable hardware.
The 3D printed jig design combined angled slot references and a threaded cylinder with embedded magnets to secure and center the cable hardware during welding
Currently in progress is a set of structural cable anchor hardware designed to sit recessed into the ceiling, and provide a gentle profile for cables to ray out towards the sculpture. These are designed to hang from Unistrut, and can accommodate one or 2 cables.
- Most pictures of the actual sculptural materials are courtesy of Matt Szösz ↩︎