Sinusoidal Birdhouse
Case Study: Iris Van Herpen
Design a birdhouse as if in the mind of a historic or contemporary notable designer, taking into account motivations, context and design philosophy.
DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Biomimicry
Movement
Multi-Disciplinary Collaboration
High Tech Meets Handcraft
Biomimicry
Birds in flight create a sinusoidal wave pattern with their wings, as captured in the image on the right. Patterns such as this inspired Iris Van Herpen’s 2018 collection Syntopia.
Xavi Bou - Ornitographies.
Movement with Light
Utilizing Rust Oleum Imagine Color Shift spray paint on black acrylic sheets allowed me to create movement with light. Depending on the angle of the viewer, the birdhouse appears either copper or green. These deep and earthy colors harken back to inspiration from nature.
Rust Oleum - Imagine Color Shift
Collaboration
Working with my friend and BYU engineering student Aaron Ruben, we used a sine wave algorithm to create a 3D graph (pictured to the right). Out of 200 points of data, every tenth piece was sliced to create a 2D shape from which the birdhouse design was created. These shapes then were wrapped around a center point to simulate the 3D graph in physical form.
Aaron Ruben
High Tech Meets Handcraft
I used a laser cutting machine to cut out the shapes derived from our 3D sine graph, and etch repeating lines into the surface as a reference to Iris Van Herpen’s signature style.
Acrylic sheets were hand-assembled and bound with copper wire at two points above and below the inner sanctum.
