Fiberglass Balls: Basic Design Project
The material system experienced here is an extreme example of our final projects in İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture, first-year Basic Design studio. Students studied fiberglass as their core material and they searched for weeks to find a proper way to expose this material’s potential into a spanning structure. They tried lots of different components, basically using molds to give shape to glass fibers. However, their final decision was to use this material without a component logic. They used air balloons as negative molds, experimenting with the construction of multiple balloons packed together as a surface. They blew the balloons after the fiberglass dried. It then became a realization problem, as they needed to find an optimum sequence to construct this without losing structural integrity, forms, and packings. Although it seems like a random stack of spheres at first sight, it was not that easy. They showed a tremendous effort to rationalize and construct it.
*Students: Alptuğ Yılmaz, Eda Tekirli, Efe Erman, Feyza Kükrer, Ahmet Çam, Seda Öznal, Özgüç Bertuğ Çapunaman, Faysal Altunbozar, Nazlı Pekdemir, Ege Acar
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