The hall display and SketchUp
Thursday, March 23rd, 2006Our third assignment for furniture design class was to design a modular system or casegood for the 8′-wide, 9′-high design department hallway. The design was to be derived from the concept used for our second assignment, the chair. (Click here to see the concept diagram and resulting chair.) The display was to house both 2D and 3D student projects, with some security arrangement to protect the projects from vandalism. Finally, the design was to be relatively inexpensive to build.
My design is straightforward. Non-reflective glass panels are suspended between floor-to-ceiling canted copper-clad uprights in front of cork-faced panels with maple trim. Copper splines connect the rectangular modules. S-curved ceiling lights highlight the artwork. The design incorporates the materials (sustainably-harvested maple, cork, and recycled copper), forms (splines and rectangles), and lines (S-curve) used in the chair design.
I wanted to learn SketchUp so I tackled the program for this project. SketchUp is easier to learn than AutoCAD but is quite sophisticated. It’s available to students at a low educational price. Even though I have a lot yet to learn to be able to use the program expertly, I did manage to come up with a decent drawing for this project. Here it is: