Working with What's Around

Under the title ‘Working with What’s Around,’ the students’ task was to design and produce furniture scale artefacts that respond directly to the inherent characteristics and history of large wooden beams salvaged from a 1940s aircraft hangar. This included close observation of each piece’s grain, machine marks and traces from previous joineries and even an attempt to look back to the landscape these Douglas Fir trees grew within.

Students participating learned to deploy a series of observational methods of increasing precision: first, describing an element in writing alone; from here sketching out each piece’s dimensions; then constructing details CAD models; and finally applying photogrammetric methods to 3D scan each piece.