Assistant Professor Jason Johnson and three EVDS students will showcase their design and creative problem-solving talents at the 2014 Beakerhead Festival in downtown Calgary.
Myrtle is the result of one design concept, dozens of prototypes, and a summer’s worth of dedication and creativity – and it’s heading to Beakerhead as part of the Little Big Street exhibit, a place where arts and engineering meet to solve social and environmental challenges.
"Beakerhead is the sum expression of people like Jason Johnson and his students in the faculty of environment design,” says Mary Anne Moser, the festival’s president. “They walk the talk of creativity and technology."
A meditation pavillion designed and fabricated on campus, Myrtle is one of a series of community-based digital fabrication projects initiated and supervised by Johnson. Its conceptual design was completed by 2013 architecture graduate Kevin Spaans, who describes the project as “an organic ordering system of components that take their shape from the myrtle leaf.”
Over the summer months, EVDS graduate students Kailey O’Farrell and Max Senini have worked to refine Spaans’ concept, building prototypes to test materials, assembly techniques and the aesthetics of the project.
“This project provided us with the opportunity to resolve the real world constraints that accompany an architectural system,” says Senini. “Given the manageable scale of this pavilion, we were able to focus on the components within this architecture to further understand the material and assembly logic. This has allowed us to explore digital fabrication methodologies and has provided us with invaluable experience in the production and assembly of a small scale pavilion. Moving forward we will be able to greatly push the skills we acquired through this process with the technology we have available to us at the Faculty of Environmental Design.”
The project is part of a continuing body of design research in digital fabrication techniques being undertaken by Johnson and his students as part of the Laboratory for Integrative Design. “They are a fantastic example of what can happen when a group of people have vision, the ability to collaborate, skills that cross disciplines, and a desire to have fun in the process of learning,” says Moser. “And now everyone who attends Beakerhead can delight in their creativity as well,"
Myrtle was made possible by a grant from Beakerhead and the support of the fabrication staff in EVDS. Johnson and the students will be presenting the project Sept. 11 at 5:30 p.m. on the grounds of the Beakerhead festival.
Top Image: The final version of Myrtle, on display at EVDS
Bottom Image: Rendering of Myrtle
Images courtesy Jason S. Johnson, David Monteyne