Sweet Onion Creations

Throw out the term “rapid prototyping technology” to anybody that’s not an engineer and you will be met with a blank stare.  Try to explain how the technology works after this introduction and you’ll get an even bigger blank stare.

Design News suggests that everybody come together and pick a common name for these machines that creates physical objects off of digital data.  The label “3D Printing” is suggested as a possible option.  However, some companies have built their brand on specific attributes and don’t like the low-end association that may come about as a result of the category being defined in these terms.

Read the whole post about the debate over Rapid Prototyping versus 3D Printing

I like the term 3D printing.  Anybody can get it pretty easily and for those of us constantly trying to explain exactly how we’re converting CAD data to architecture models, the term makes easy access for our clients.   The word “prototyping” isn’t in their vernacular and it comes off as a bit pretentious in casual conversation.

If you haven’t had a chance to check out the TED website, you’re missing out. There is a wealth of great videos on a variety of topics and they do a good job of focusing on architecture and design. I caught one this morning by Cameron Sinclair that was very inspiring. About halfway through I about fell out of my chair when he mentioned he lives in Bozeman, Montana. A bit of digging turns up that Cameron was an adjunct faculty here at Montana State University. Not sure if he still calls Montana home but it’s pretty cool to see him win the 2006 TED prize.

Check out his talk here:

The New York Times Architecture section ran an interesting piece on famous architects and their plans for their personal collections. If you thought architecture collections are art, you’re right, and these rock stars are asking big bucks for their personal collections. How big? The article doesn’t give specifics but when the Museum of Modern Art is saying some of these are out of their price range, you know these famous architects are asking for some serious change.

Rock star Frank Gehry’s collection is mentioned specifically:
“the archive may be in its own class in terms of size, consisting of about 30,000 square feet of models, a slide library, a digital archive and more than 5,000 drawings.”

Now that’s a lot of models. The real expense seems to be in the storage and keeping a staff on board to catalog, organize, and retrieve information from the collection.

The article finishes on a bit of a downer mentioning that architects Billie Tsien and Tod Williams typically let their models collect dust in a corner until they completely deteriorate or they pitch them.