Construction Material Technology Platform 
Professors: Michelle Howard and Luciano Parodi

Studio Interstitial Warming
Part 1: Turtle Case Study

Studio Brief: Wand: Gewand: Gottfried Semper argued that Architecture should be like a garment (wand = wall, gewand = garment). If this is so, both architecture and garments can be worn. A garment is seen to be worn when its boundary moves with the body. Buildings are typically inhabited, not worn, because the body moves independently of the boundary, but could this change? Can the building be more intrinsically related to us, than our current usage of it as a stage on which we move?
With these questions in mind, The studio underwent 2 interconnected units
Unit 1 :The tortoise and the turtle are animals whose thermal comfort system is ten times more efficient than that of humans and whose interaction with its environment takes place primarily through its hull. Each Student reconstructed a particular one with special attention to the carapace, plastron, the retraction and emergence of the limbs.
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In my case, I chose the African Helmeted Turtle and designed the carapace and the plastron on Autodesk Maya then 3D-printed, drew the skeleton on Rhino in 3D then laser cutter from a thin wood material, sewed the skin and filled it with cotton.The main success of this process was that the model was called "stripper turtle" due to its capability to remount each part of it.
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