ITC, or Introduction to Craft, is another one of our classes here at the CDCC that in a nutshell teaches us how to think with our hands with materials. Over the past week, we have been researching and thinking about our latest assignment – simply exploring casting techniques with a variety of materials (concrete, tabby, resin, rammed earth, and hempcrete,) and limitless possibilities with the only constraints being that it must be cast and that it must have the rough volume of a brick.
As we are designing our studio project into construction documents, it is important to step back and have a hands-on experience with the techniques and materials that we could be using. One practice, making formwork, will become very familiar to us.
Here you can see some of us starting to build our basic formwork for our casts.
Although formwork is not as important in this assignment, (more so the experimentation of materials,) it serves an important duty nonetheless.
Lastly here are some test casts that a few of us had done:
A little messy and a rough first go, but iterating and reiterating is nothing new to us. Looking forward to all the different materials and forms they take on this coming Thursday.