mays albaik: illuminating fabrication

this was a project iI had worked on during the summer of 2011, following my sophomore year as an architecture student. the collection of my work falls under one concept, developed in the first phase undertaken. the concept is about cultural transformation, and speaks of the growing and diversifying of the middle eastern culture, of it being solid and homogenous, and then slowly become a more open-minded, diverse and colorful culture. the concept served as a guide to me. in the collages, I used plants to express the idea of growth from the hard, strong solidity of an old fashioned culture to the beautiful, light and fruitful branches of a more open-minded and diverse one. as I added a third dimension to my work, this idea of cultural transformation led me towards experimenting with unorthodox materials, and I focused on foam as an end product, not only a surrogate material. moving on to create my final piece of the semester, an object of illumination, I found that having a concept, something to start with, was immensely helpful. my lamp sports a very solid, harsh and naked base, out of which it grows like a slender plant and becomes an airy, light object, defying gravity and consisting of different entities instead of one solid mass.

the fabrication of the prototype was done in three parts, happening simultaneously, but separetly , then the pieces were brought together. These three parts were fabricating the pod, the base, and the tube. the pod is a rib-and-spine structure, made up of notched, laser-cut pieced of 5.0 mm acrylic. the central rib is what holds the lightbublbs in place. on this structure sits the skin; cnc-routed pieces of styrofoam, each piece is a hollow and uncapped extruded hexagon, with the bottom center part thin as a veil, allowing light to pass through easily. the styrofoam pieces are connected to tabs on the structure with foam tape. the tube is made of polished stainless steel, and bent with rollers into the desired profile. holes were drilled in to help attatch the floating pod to it with fishing line tied to steel rods on both ends. those steel rods go into the tube and hold it in place; a technique popular in jewelry design. the fabrication of the base went through several stages. the first was designing the object using a 3d cad program, the cnc-routing it out of stacked mdf wood. next, the wood was was used as a positive shape to vacuum-form a mold out of polystyrene for the concrete casting. the casting of the concrete base contained a laser-cut 6.0mm sheet of mild steel as reinforcement, onto which a steel tube was welded; to be the sleeve that the stainless steel tube would slide into. the mild steel sheet also included padded bolts, which acted as both a mechanical joint between the steel and the concrete, and feet that allowed the base to float just above the surface of the ground.

Phase 1-concept development. Media: Collage