Inter/Section

Inter/Section was a design for the exhibition High Performance – Evolution and Innovation in Canadian Design, part of the 2010 Cultural Olympiad associated with the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Consistent with the exhibition theme of Canadian innovation in design, inter/section demonstrates the potential of contemporary wood fabrication technologies to generate formal variation from standardized wood construction materials within the constraints of material efficiency, ease of assembly/disassembly, and adaptive reuse. The form of inter/section structures the relationship between the viewer, the exhibition objects, and associated graphic information. The specific shifts in the surface form respond to the particular placement and spatial dimensions of each of the exhibition objects. Developed to be reconfigured in other spaces, inter/section employs a standardized placement of interlocking connection slots on the vertical sections. These create a system with a high degree of flexibility that allows the overall reconfiguration of the installation while maintaining the specificity inherent in the vertical sections. All components in the assembly were joined through interlocking friction connections without the use of fasteners or adhesives. The installation was milled entirely from of 172 sheets of plywood cut using a 3-axis CNC router. The 288 vertical planes are paired opposites created using a series of 144 unique single curvilinear cutting paths on 144 sheets of plywood. The remaining 28 sheets were used for interlocking horizontal pieces that shape this particular installation. The entire assembly can be packaged to fit within a volume of 4’-0” x 8’-0” x 7’-0”. This project was done in collaboration with Oliver Neumann and the Design and Computation Group at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, University of Toronto.