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Monthly Archives: August 2012

Corrugations

August 18, 2012
Tectonics
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Corrugations

Corrugations

Corrugations

 

Corrugations

One of the local cladding materials where I have been living is corrugated steel, borrowed from the agricultural industry that uses it for a range of storage buildings. Most of these are circular in plan and so only have one sort of joint and no corner detail. When it is used for rectangular buildings it normally has a folded angle cover strip over the corner junction. I was looking at some German aeroplanes, built during the lead up to the second world war, that have corrugated skins to see how else to treat the detailing of such a material (aluminium in the case of the aeroplanes). The use of corrugated  skins on aeroplanes seems strange, providing little torsional rigidity and a large surface area for drag, but the detailing is very careful. One of the examples is from the Western Canada Aviation Museum in Winnipeg and the other from Duxford near Cambridge in the UK. I have a few more pictures, including some interior shots, so I may post some more another day. The crimped edge seems to provide a much greater range of joint possibilities. I was thinking of using corrugated steel for the cladding of a house I was working on and looked at these ‘planes to help work out a range of scale when detailing the skin.

 

Integral Armature

August 13, 2012
Armatures
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Minneapolis armature

Minneapolis armature

I was in Minneapolis at the weekend and went to the Science Museum (to see the medical quackery exhibit – another story). They had a few dinosaur skeletons on display, all with integral armatures running within the bones. It is quite a common practice but I have rarely seen it done well (one in Vienna comes to mind). The two pictures here – sorry for the poor image quality – show a couple of places where the demands on the steel are greater than the cross sectional depth of the bones, so the steel emerges through the casts of the bones. The confusion between the skeletal and steel structures feels unconvincing to me, but as you know from my posts a few days ago I am prejudiced towards the less bashful armatures.

Staircase

August 2, 2012
Staircase
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Staircase

A staircase model from the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris in stereo. Usual procedure for these – go cross-eyed so that you get three images. Concentrate on the middle one so that the two images become resolved on top of each other. Try to relax and the image depth will improve.

 

If you are having difficulty resolving the image, make it smaller and try again.

Broken Venus

August 1, 2012
Figures
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Crouching Venus (Stereoscopic)

A couple of stereoscopic views of Venus from the courtyard at the École des Beaux-Arts, both a little broken. Above is a version of the Crouching Venus (which works well in 3D if you go cross eyed and register one image over the other – make the image smaller if you are having trouble). Below is a version of the Venus de Medici, who I used to draw in sections – the original is only just over four feet high so the scale is ambiguous.

Venus de Medici (Stereoscopic)