Week Five Journal:

This week I learned about the importance of the honesty of materials. The main idea of "materials being honest" began during the Arts & Crafts movement, Frank Lloyd Wright is probably one of the most famous architects to practice this belief although he was not a part of the Arts & Craft movement, just inspired by it. In the Making of Architecture class that I am in we focused a lot on steel connections this week, and the work in progress pictures that are shown during class are almost more interesting than the completed pictures in some cases. 

My partner, Shelby Parrish, and I are working together one what supplies to use for the expressive wall project in studio and we decided to use milk jugs to create the facade. The curves on the wall are based off of climate data and plastic is a recyclable material, so it creates a motif of being environmentally friendly. The first issue we worked on was how to create a "fabric" out of the plastic - we cut up the jugs into 3" equilateral triangles (the first jug produced 11 and the second one produced 23, we got way more efficient!) Then we went through trial and error and decided to use staples for the connections because it allowed movement and is quick and easy. Now we are just working out on the kinks and shifting our focus from the construction of the facade to the construction of the structure's skeleton. We have a lightweight design it is just down to the technical issues of how to connect the skin to the skeleton and how to get the skeleton to hang to the wall. Honesty of material is what inspired us for the construction of the skin, so is what will probably inspire us to fix the rest of our issues!