So, I read through the microarchitecture as the idea of Gothic theory and style by Francois Boucher, and essentially the whole reading focuses on the term of microarchitecture. And so, the term was first coined by the author in 1976, where microarchitectures now are more commonly used to denote a more broad category of western medieval monuments and objects who sort of design incorporates more miniaturized architectural elements. So, from left to right, you have spires, you have the cupolas, the budgerises, and pinnacles also. So, microarchitectural forms were back then most frequently applied to, I guess, more like church furniture. So, on the bottom, you know, you have the reliquaries, you have the statue canopies. The third image is a little hard to find, but I think that is the altar of Siboria, if I'm not mistaken. The sort of like entrance, like canopy thing, right? And then on the right, you have the choir screens. And so, you know, granted onto the structures, microarchitecture could sort of more aestheticize certain religious discourses, you know, provide theatrical frameworks for programs of images or gematize more of the performance of rituals. So, most of these architectural furnishings were often visually calibrated to evoke biblical buildings or monuments where the author, Francois Boucher, gives the example of heavenly Jerusalem. And so, something that interesting that happened was that looking at microarchitecture versus structure itself. So, and you know, he describes that even the most literate people of the Middle Ages took architectural descriptions quite lightly and sort of just, I wouldn't say ignore them, but just pass them. Instead, they were more fascinated by the microarchitecture itself, which, for example, you know, the reliquaries and other mementos in the building itself. So, there was this almost more religious way of experiencing microarchitecture rather than the full scale only architecture itself. It said that to medieval churchgoers and pilgrims, sacred objects offered a more or infinitely more valid, transcendental experience. And he, and he goes like a vicarious identification, rather than the cathedrals themselves who structural arrogance, only if you could appreciate and even less would comprehend. So, in a strange way these smaller objects are misjudged and could be neglected in a time where bluntly put size matters in a way, because from 1160s onwards, the construction of churches will no longer be separate from the drive of the cities with their ambition for or scale or, or height. So where the cost of structures increased until the end of Gothic gigantism around 1300. So here I'm showing the example of, forgive the pronunciation is Saint Etienne. Saint Etienne. Etienne. It means Saint Stephen and French. I see. So this was in 1060. So from here and on the competition for high and structural daring was restricted to more identifiable, you know, mighty towers which symbolize this almost holy power and civic pride. But then it was around the mid 13th century where the discovery of less extravagant trend setting. So this is an example, developed into challenges the more modest project so the right it gives an example on the left of saint chapel and the Santa Maria de la Spina. So this is where we started to see. Obviously, I'm comparing the left to the right you see more of a static vocabulary in the world of you know, two stalls funds and just micro architecture in general. So according to Boucher was. Yeah, so according to Boucher was the over heightened emotional needs of the population. And the need for new and inventive complexities that increase the market for small structures and so working at a, you know, much more smaller scale. This allowed architects to perform more sophisticated model experiments. And that were, or just like more imaginative ideas that were beyond the capabilities of any builder were sort of now, now possible because of the scale. So there was this ability for, and he's this term here called structural forgiveness. So this brings me to my next comparison of the poetic and the realizable building. So the dilemma between the two is now almost resolved with micro architecture so poems that describe complex tombs, a domed star started vault. I'm in a grand cantilevered mirror so the these are also all books and poems on the left on the left. So, and he says that these are like verbal buildings. And the most of them sort of rest on slender supports are made of precious Polish materials and are covered with jewels and ornaments. So since there's a lot of these fantasies cannot be carried out to scale structures became smaller and more gadgety. So the author gives the example that you know this sort of antiret, antirational constructions became almost so extravagant that they could only be realizing a structurally forgiving realm of buildings whose extraordinarily daring elevations required much smaller size. So, oops. So the complete, you know, to two tower church facades in the ball the team of the Louvain tabernacle indicates its true immensity and therefore results dilemma between the poetic and the realizable building. So, when Gothic theory had sort of stabilized by 1300 AD it simplicity in the combinations of squares, you know triangles and polygons led to this quick exhaustion of basic variations. Bearing the always logical design combination with therefore invented and applied first to smaller structures. Micro architecture and then to vaulting. So this is images of the base of tabernacle by Lechler. I actually searched the definition for a tabernacle and it seems it's, it defines as like a as a meeting spot in a more of a religious way. But I'm not sure how that's translated to micro architecture itself. Well, and yeah, and in a Christian church tabernacle is often where they keep something precious, namely the, the, the hosts for the sacrament for communion so it's the thing on top of the base is really a kind of box a container. Okay. So, micro architecture, I stated before is sort of being used as experiment experimentation to. But, and I think this is quite relevant to sort of like what we're going through now towards the end of the 13th century we saw a lot of events. For example, he gives examples of the, of the collapse of the of the bouvet in 1284 on the Babylonian exile of the prophecy. And then the start of the hundred years war in 1337, the catastrophic monetary devaluations of between 1285 and 1314 which were followed by the failure of the Bardi and peruzzi banks in 1345 and then of course, you have the black death shows plague between 1347 1350. So that brought a lot of reduction major patronage. So, you know, parish churches, civic projects and more privately finance architectural environments became the source of revenue for the architect. So the sort of reduced size was almost counterbalanced by the enrichment of details on this sophisticated treatment of materials and more daring design. And so because of their attractiveness and manual cost the small monuments quickly moved outdoors and into the city itself. And so they would become innumerable on candidly but Orioles, all the chains over memorials fountains wells. And they even said galleries for Percival clubs. So he also mentioned banisters tracery and small vault design, and it's stated by 1400 that these small commissions are kind of for about 50% of output in northern workshops. So, in addition to these new crafts, the introduction of double curves and branch work had started. So, these were more a forest gothic and from boiling gothic as an organic abstraction, which represented this more anti structural theme. And so this is where we see the example of what's called open work spires. And so you can find them, it says, most notably in in freeberg cologne and the Indiana, and these are seemingly so vulnerable that they had to be heavily reinforced by iron. And this proves to be an excellent example of, you know, the expression of the intersection of, I guess, micro and macro architecture. So they sort of reflect the spirit of contemporary tower reliquaries. And then the example on the left, which is the custodial Toledo Cathedral, contracting 1515. And this represents sort of as seen through the eyes, which see in, and this is a quote, the visible world images of heavenly things so one of the most stunning constructions dedicated to the apotheosis of Christ. And this is, you know, the flyer, the flyers the crown like dome, the tabernacle around the risen savior, etc. A part of this sort of immensely sophisticated architectural entity. So, if we view the buttress figurines as a man hide the structure would measure, you know, 300 feet in height. So, and these are all the examples in the reading itself. And I thought this could be more over discussion based thing where, you know, we, it's sort of a hard sometimes to identify what each thing is I'm not sure if it's the, you know, a lot of detail or it's just a bad quality of the image. But through, you know, in light of, you know, all the examples and points that the author made our microarchitecture can be seen as scale less anti rational and sort of understood by all so within such a small space that has a potential to express systems of decoration complexity and then daring. What is this anti structural elements that are still based off theoretical principles. So to end with a quote from the text talking about microarchitecture. It says dazzling structural dexterity intensely geometric complexity and a hypnotic dissolution of the structure through light. Excellent. Yeah, you definitely got to the heart of this particular article by the shade. And these examples are wonderful. What do we make of them. What about what what attributes of these indicate structural daring. I mean, for example, the thing that just these examples here. So, can you see my my cursor. Sure. So, you see this sort of, it almost looks heavy and extremely, you know, ornamental and then you get these sort of gaps here that you that you can see past. And you can see through that part of the of micro of microarchitecture. And then here in this example, you know, you have such sort of what seems to be a light base and the heavy top. In terms of structural daring, I think it had many more capabilities that we see more or that we can explore more on the computer, whereas their exploration was microarchitecture. Yeah, and the microarchitecture that we're seeing here would have been oftentimes can be made of wood carved out of single blocks not really built up of individual ashlar blocks as a real building would be So they're, they're able to do things at the smaller scale that couldn't be done full architectural scale. Yeah, the top heaviness of that last example that you were just pointing to. I mean a base has very slender supports. And we see about mid mid height there. There's a kind of arches that land on nothing right so sort of like a column less arcade, creating a great overhang, and then the superstructure on top being of course a combination of just a big top heavy and then further up again not only just a slender tower on top but the tower itself was made of even more slender element so it's that thing if you just wanted to express a daring thing where if that were really made of individual pieces you would not want to shift the base at all. Right, it would just the whole thing would just topple over. Yeah, it seems the one on the. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say it seems like this. So this piece is one with this piece here and then that the sort of over extending overhang is like an add on. Right. It's almost it's like a sleeve that has been like put on this structure here. And what's great also about that image is the juxtaposition with the actual arcade behind it or around it. And how, in a sense, by comparison undaring it is those two peers on either side of it, an arch that does not have a very great span. Of course we don't see what it's holding up above. But yeah the we'll look at these buildings and try to think of what the desire of the builders will was and whether those desires were met or not met and again because we don't really have any historical documentation. It's not before the Renaissance people are not writing about architecture yet. It's really the micro architecture that we can start to see what they probably would have liked to have done at the full building scale and just we're not able to. So we brought up the open works fires be having the tensile, the steel in it. Because there again there's a desire for a slender thing that's dematerialized, but for it to statically support that load or resist wind they have to start going to tensile structure so that is. That is sort of harkens to the article by Trachtenberg last week about Gothic as you know proposing it's it's it's renamed medieval modernism because they were trying to do. In a sense the aesthetic becomes driven by the the technology and a few stone in a way that it just can't really do until you start adding some sort of tensile structural elements. So here we do see a sort of at this moment these late Gothic buildings. Just prior to the Renaissance war and some and some depending what you call the Renaissance that's what you call the Gothic medieval period. There's overlap and we're sort of seeing a similar steel is where iron is starting to be used and that stone just on its own is having a hard time achieving some of the desires that we're seeing in the micro architecture. Are there any details of the the metal work within in the stone structures. Are there any details that we can access or yeah yeah in terms of drawings. Well, yeah so in the late Gothic period there there's no drawings from most of the Gothic period in the late Gothic we we do see a couple of elevations and things but in detail detailed design drawings. No we don't have anything like that. Most of these buildings have been renovated renovated multiple times over the the 19th century there was a big boom and got the renovation. And so a lot of these buildings are actually quite well documented now. But of course what goes on deep inside of this the stone we don't know in terms of clamps and and any kind of steel that was being used inside so you have clamps in Greek architecture Roman architecture. Helping out a little bit in terms of shifting of blocks and things like that but not really not not really providing any kind of tensile support. So the the the metal that we're seeing in here or that we saw with the example of St. Paul's the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral that is using metal in a in a in a tensile way. Are any of the things the the micro architecture examples made I missed this but was where any of them made out of an iron. Oh sure yeah and summer made out of gold the reliquaries are often made of precious metals. Yeah so with these photos that are from the article they're black and white it's it's it's hard to tell what the materials are but like this stuff right. Yeah so you can imagine that a goldsmith working architecturally can do all sorts of things, not only in terms of the fact that it doesn't really have to support against gravity, but the fact that it's so much more easy, easily worked than stone. And so these are architectural fantasies in a way that they're being rendered in a medium that that is not necessarily architectural and so just like some of the contemporary artists works that we've seen the fantasy artwork also as a kind of an expression of taking dematerialization of structure to a limit. These things can happen in the in mediums like this that that can't really happen at full scale. And what were the limitations of using say iron and what were the technological limitations of using iron and the large scale. Well you know that the iron and the medieval period wasn't really very strong compared to today's steel so I don't think there's a lot that went on in terms of experimentation what's really interesting is the do you remember the iron chains and the medieval. Let me bring up an image of that. So that is my yeah I'll go ahead and share my screen. So, yeah so this is, if you recall this video. So the flying into the building like this does give a sense of the sort of dramatic vertiginousness of the structure from looking down and now we're looking up and we're seeing the pros and peers of them. Which are greatly deflected. And there's a good chance that it would have collapsed if they hadn't put in these, these iron chains these long iron chains that anchored to the far western to the far front is peace and walls and were then anchored into the peers themselves so when you're there when you go there today you can still see these iron chains. So this this was not planned right this. This is something that happened a couple of hundred years after the, the so called completion of the cathedral. And this is not the kind of iron you'd want to be building cantilevers with or doing any kind of heroic structures. So this is, and here we can see the modification where it's been, oh sorry, it's been holes have been cut to create a channel to go to the, to the far pier. So can you imagine these pins here, trying to, you know, hold up this this building and how, how scary that must be. So, yeah, this image that we saw at the beginning of the semester kind of indicates that that people were aware of collapses they were aware of the fragility and we discussed how this is actually what this rendering on Amiens Cathedral is quite accurate in terms of how these arches would fail. And so this is kind of like a micro architecture. Also, isn't it where it's, it's trying to describe something that at least this particular sculptor had some some familiarity with the way that structures work. So, this is the kind of collapse that people would have known about. They would have seen such collapses. Yeah, so today when we look at things at the architectural scale and so now you may remember sauce cathedral from our side by side comparison that people had to figure out which which slide was being described to them. This is, this is how contemporary visitors experience these buildings as you know sort of soaring and serene. And then even today though we have, let's see, there have been buildings in Christ Church New Zealand and so forth that have collapsed from earthquakes. So we see that. But we also see these the deformation of these buildings you know the the heroic structures that have to be added since this is Boba Cathedral which Alex mentioned collapsed had a major collapse here. And interventions had to happen where you can see that here this used to be the, the, the, the span of this arcade arch was twice as big. And after the collapse they added peers in between. So, that was one intervention to keep it from collapsing again. This is a more modern intervention these wooden trusses with with these colors put around and then another trust going across here. We just don't know if this is needed. There's just no way for us to be able to calculate what's going on in here. So, and as we've discussed before the big problem is this dematerialization of the walls. And the sort of very top heavy mass of the vaulted ceiling, being supported by by increasingly narrow slender structure. And it's the opposite of what we see in Roman architecture where you've got more of the heaviness down below. You've got the heaviness kind of up above and in the simulation app that's what the design goal of precarity is all about where it's the weight of the stone up high so it's the the weight of each block times the height. If you really think of it that way. You know the Gothic desire is very much about precariousness. So, just also continuing on the theme of micro architecture. This screen is basically a bridge. Where we have. We have supports for these arches that are just hanging in midair so a column list arcade, and then it's repeated on the even more micro architecture here so these spires are. These spires are a kind of open work form and open work structure here. And so to be able to literally walk underneath this and thinking that this is stone now to Jonathan's question I don't know if there's steel holding this up, it's possible that it's somehow all masonry. Probably got steel in there this is a this is a very late Gothic building. But the intention there is certainly manifested in micro architecture and then sort of made architectural here. But of course people just can't do it. Builders just couldn't do it at the real architectural scale, but you get the sense from looking at something like this, if they could they would have. St. Teresa and extra ecstasy by Bernini again a very heavy stone piece of sculpture with a very narrow base and overhanging cloud formations and dangling foot. Again this idea of suspension and of levitation is something that can be done at the scale of a sculpture but not not at a real architectural scale. And as we've also looked at a sort of levitation of these canopies again with columnless arcades above sacred figures, whereas the profane figure is bearing the weight of the of the thing on its back. And yeah so this idea of a fear of buildings collapsing is not only represented sculpturally and in painting but also in in written text so as we discussed when we did the reading with Procopius. In his panjiric one of the things he said was that the dome is suspended apparently by nothing. Much to the peril of all those beneath and so the idea of peril as a sublime fear as a sublime generator is something that seems to be thematic. And even desired in terms of what the patrons of these buildings were were looking for. Yeah, so isn't this the really the central problem of gothic it's doing everything that could be done. Before the modern movement before you start getting industrial production of high quality steel. This is almost a kind of modern desire. And they certainly by the late gothic it's taken to an extreme. And this extreme of course we we see with all of these collapse and certainly the ruins of the churches and Cyprus. And what we looked at with the shell fire at Swiss on France Cathedral. And the fires are, you know, dangerous, and have failed many times. And so here's the outside of a cathedral with the, the tie rods to keep the these amazing daring buttresses from flapping in the wind. So those tie rods needed are the interventions that we saw inside the choir of bobe needed. We just don't know. And so modern engineers have tried to come up with a way to talk about these structures. And none of it seems to be that accurate in terms of predictive quality. And so, as architectural historians, we're really sort of left without understanding. What we can see what the builders desires might have been but we can't necessarily know what how they went about thinking about making things taller. And at what point are they just not structurally stable. Yeah, so anyway, so with the simulations kind of leading into the simulation work. I think in some ways you guys just playing with the simulation app already have a better intuitive understanding of arched and vaulted and domed masonry structure then perhaps even engineers working with finite element models and so it's in a sense it's kind of like micro architecture, but, but still as an even easier to make than a reliquary or tabernacle. And not the materials are not as expensive as as gold. So we've got our digital blocks here. And so to be able to go through an iterative design process thinking about masonry is something that the medieval builders certainly did not have access to. So if we look at the buildings that are on the ground this is a this is a mapping gothic France project that we worked on in the art history department and a couple hundred cathedrals with high res photographs and nodal images 360 images and so forth. And if we start thinking we what we talked about was Jean Boni. Last week, June presented. So in these theory that rib vaulting was used here, pointed arches were used in North African Islamic architecture and migrating through Italy, and that's, it's because they converged in France. That's why France sort of invented gothic or medieval modernism. They have these two building elements of constructional and structural superiority of the ribs and the pointed arches coming together geographically and collaborative and making gothic and then it explodes and gets re exported to other areas. So there's a lot of ways that we can sort of model and analyze this transformation this evolution from more Roman like or Roman architecture to what we think of as gothic and it's spread. And I think a lot of the historical analysis of gothic that the dangerous desires of light and height and slender dematerialized structures was kind of a French thing, and that it was exported relatively successfully to Germany, Spain, England, Netherlands, and so forth. And that when you get to the gothic in the eastern Mediterranean, namely the buildings built by the crusaders and the kingdom after the crusaders were forced out of the Levant, they started building very sort of gothic looking buildings in Cyprus. And these buildings are not as, as, as elegant as French models, even though they may have had French Masons there, they were a French dynasty Latin dynasty in Cyprus. The buildings are more muscular and smart squat to the ground, sometimes as, as elegantly decorated not in these cases this is a monastic church this one would have been a little bit austere by intention, but we can see that certainly there's a lot of elegance here and so the, the historians of Cypriot gothic architecture have talked about Cyprus as being provincial form of gothic that's so far from the center of production that you've got sort of hand handed versions of gothic. Images from buildings and showing a little bit where they are in terms of seismic hazard this is more site this is less seismically hazard this is more seismically has hazard and these are degrees of seismic hazard. What's interesting is this becomes kind of a laboratory to see that the buildings that are in the eastern part of the island fared much better than the buildings in the western part in fact we have these are almost totally ruined these are partially ruined. And so we might get a sense of the challenges that were being faced by these builders to maybe present a different story than center and periphery from Paris from ill de France but that here we can see that the the builders built this church. The church of St. Peter and Paul and something happened you can see that this wall has been replaced. These buttresses are almost certainly newer than the original. These might have come in different phases and not a product of careful engineering analysis of what this building needs for static or dynamic loading in an earthquake, but just more a sense of fear, you know how much mass they put here is more an idea of how they are. So it's, for example with the simulation model you can just go through different earthquake scenarios and keep changing the parameters of how things are, but these guys had to do it on the ground. As buildings were deforming and collapsing so here we see that this pier was originally a smaller diameter and they, they widen the pier. This is the main church of the Greeks and famigusta things like this gap here so that there's a lot of stresses around an opening during an earthquake and this keeps the lentil from cracking during a tremor. So a lot of inventive things happen happening and just a lot of, we are just really scared of the next earthquake and so we're just going to put buttresses on buttresses. This is the, the cathedral in Nicosia. One of the interesting things here, this is this sort of trapezoidal buttresses are in plan. They're actually sort of hollow in the inside so it's kind of like a corrugated buttressing of this wall and this wall is done very well. There's definitely some deformation in the, in the arches here but it has survived many earthquakes. So, as an evolutionary process. The buildings are subjected to different seismic zones. And so the builders and the people are maintaining these buildings are learning a lot sort of as they go, even though earthquakes are happening intermittently. So, this is the cathedral in famigusta. Some people think it's the church of St. Francis. It's not sure which it is. But anyways, grand plan is huge and there's nothing left of it and really there's nothing left of these over here either. So, so here are the earthquakes in the Mediterranean. The red ones are in Cyprus. The yellow ones are in the Levant through the medieval period. So you can see that, you know, there might be several decades go by and people are, what we actually see in the buildings is people started getting really daring again. And then the daring level of daring and construction goes down after a new series of earthquakes. So this heat map. This is the kind of sort of final thing I wanted to talk about in terms of, you know, why we would want to have earthquake in the simulation. Because the evolution of Gothic form. So, you know, these jumboneses theories, the forms come together, the components come together, they arise in Paris and then they're exported and the exports to Cyprus just lose a lot in translation because it's so far away. But if we really look at where things are seismically active and think about the types of buildings that are aware, well, certainly Cyprus is very seismically active. And so we have to sort of think about these buildings as not static things that are glued together, like micro architecture, but as kind of spring loaded systems that have their own resonant frequencies. And the joints between these blocks, there's mortar, but the mortar doesn't really provide like an adhesive that keeps things together from splitting apart like this. So in this case we made the arch a little bit taller and actually behaved a little bit better during the exact same earthquake so it's not necessarily things that are taller or more susceptible to earthquake. It's just really about the form itself so you really have to just play with different forms to understand the resonant frequencies, while at the same time keeping an eye to aesthetics. And as we've been talking about the theme in this class, you know, the generators of the sublime does something look more daring but it's not really more daring does something more daring but it actually doesn't look more daring. The only way we can say, is it more really more daring versus looks more daring is by testing it. So the builders in the Eastern Mediterranean would have sort of understood intuitively, I think that the number of stories in a building makes a difference how big the wall openings are makes a difference in terms of seismic resistance. Things that are not symmetrical so so many Byzantine churches are bilaterally symmetrical, then the Latins come in and try to build their long names and these wobble during ground movement, flying buttresses do horribly because they can wobble so much out of plane and and lentils crack like crazy, but they still the Latin builders wanted to have their, their tympanums they just Byzantine builders with Islamic builders would not have tympanums here like this they'd either leave a grill a wooden grill or, or are more open and the Latin builders want to have their sculpted tympanums which ended up cracking the lentils a lot so we see lots of cracked lentils and snipers. This is the cathedral in Ecosia again, the one with the cascading buttresses on buttresses outside. So yeah they've put, they've put tensile members here wooden tie beans, which are common in Islamic and Byzantine architecture and the Latins just didn't want to do it. So I think that they had larger clear story windows up here which have been reduced. Quite significantly. So, slowly but surely they evolved to be more like Islamic or Byzantine buildings, but they sort of went kicking and screaming. So, here we see noion cathedral. And the cathedral in Ecosia so the cathedral in Ecosia is really almost as tall as noion in France. And you've got shafts as much bigger and then when you get to Amiens and Beauvais they go even taller, but there's also something here about the number of stories. If you have just one more story about the, the aisle arcade level. There's like a breakpoint here and you might think of that this force with that lever is less than when you go higher up and you've got, you've got more stories, and even where you've got the same height but three distinct stories. So you've got a gallery on top of an aisle. And you have this kind of vulnerable breakpoint here and so these two buildings, noion, noion and Ecosia are about the same size, but this has a less top heavy mass, because it has a stronger base. Really you don't want a top heavy mass because the same ground shift will be harder on a building that has a more precarity, a mass, the same mass but higher up because the length of the lever is longer. So the buildings in Cyprus start out being a bit bigger. And then after 1350 when there's a huge earthquake, the bases the aisles and proportionally seem to get greater to there so there's kind of an evolution even a new construction. And if we look at this map. So here the yellow is two story churches and the red is three or four story churches. And so sure enough the French cathedrals have you know multiple stories and are very tall. But we see that in Italy everything is two stories. Even if the church is quite large. Like the Duomo and Florence. It's still two stories. And so you might say okay Gothic was exported to Germany, Spain and England. But you see the two stories are in the more seismically stable areas. When you start getting into the Wales massive already start having some two story buildings. And certainly the grand Spanish Gothic cathedrals are all in this area which is also pretty seismically stable. So here in Lisbon you can see, you know, terrible tub earthquake 1755 or so destroyed the city. So, it doesn't mean that you can't have a taller or multi story cathedral because some people would just keep trying and rebuilding and hope that something bad doesn't happen again. But here we see that the distribution of structural daring is not so much how far you are from Paris. It's really a hand handed and ground hugging and two stories. It's really, it's really mapped to seismic hazard. So it's interesting to think of buildings as being designed, and many architectural historians will talk about this as an aesthetic thing that the French love and the site and the French liked skinny structures and, but maybe the desires as we see in the micro architecture are kind of pervasive, but they're curtailed by seismic hazard. So yeah the other desire of light. So that was height we were talking about this desire of light in Cyprus you know the windows are small and the ones that were large have been largely filled in, which makes the building more seismically stable. resistant to seismic movement. But historians have said well maybe the French love light but in the eastern Mediterranean is just too much light so they had to start to start pulling the shades down. I don't know we just don't know no one's written about this from the can every time we don't even know when this was filled and it could have been filled in, you know 30 years ago. But regardless of when it was filled in, it is more structurally sound for an anti seismic now. So then taking a look at the seismic map again. Here we've got three colors yellow is small windows. Orange is medium sized Claire story windows they almost fill the space or about half the space. And then red is clear story windows that pretty much span the whole space. So once again we see that. Okay yep the French love light. It's translated well to England Spain and Germany, but in Italy, the windows are smaller and they're almost always in the Claire story oculi. So, which are also very seismically resistant circles circular aperture and a wall is much better than anything with corners. And so we see a very interest similar pattern of small of small windows. In seismically active areas medium size and transitional areas and then read in areas that are not seismically active. So it's it's one thing for us to use the simulation model try to get an intuitive sense of Gothic buildings for earthquake but then we've also got this to think about these buildings were built before. They were invented and as we saw with World War one many of the got the cathedrals had a terrible time with shell fire. And, but even a medieval buildings this was these kind of balls they're still stuck in a wall of of St. George of the Greeks and found a goose to from Ottoman bombardment. Attacking the besieging the city. So we don't know if St. George of the Greeks was destroyed from this bombardment or as all the other 50 gothic buildings and Cyprus, it was destroyed by successive earthquakes. Okay, so. Yeah, hopefully that gives an idea of the what we're thinking about here is to think like builders designers of gothic buildings dealing with struck with static forces and then having to think. Well the French probably didn't have to think much about earthquakes they didn't have to think about wind.  Also the French, the French scholar in the 18th century. Camille Don La who did a big monograph about the Soviet churches. He was only there for two years he never experienced an earthquake. While he was there it was very seismically inactive around that those decades. And so, all of his, you know all of his theories about why separate architecture couldn't quite match French gothic was a center periphery model. So, yeah so why don't we, why don't we sort of take matters into our own hands here and work through some of the simulations. So. Okay, so we've got 10 by half of you have submitted models so far. Is anybody having trouble submitting a model. My downloads so not working. Okay. Is it, is it same issue is it same issue that log on huh. Has anyone else encountered that that issue that Peter seeing. I mean the jackassin. What's the issue. The file for a Mac. It's the file downloads is something called login and then doesn't seem to load the program. But when you downloaded. Does anybody else have the Mac version. I use anybody download them. Yeah I this morning, I uploaded, I think, from my Mac, and it was fine but it was the, I guess the fourth version. I downloaded the zip, unzipped it and was able to open it. It should just be like a program right. Yeah. Okay. So jack, I would assume it has something can you download the PDFs from the, for the articles. Okay. Yeah, maybe it's just the way something with the download that you're doing the way that it's, I'll, I'll try doing it through like Chrome or something that might work. And after this class I'll try to, I'll put, I'll put both versions of Windows and Mac on another server that on AWS server that and send out that link alternatively. Okay. So, yeah, so in the application. You guys might have noticed that there's this design goal pulled down so. And this is interesting to think about because we've talked about the desires that seem to be apparent in the buildings themselves of height of increasing height, or a sense of height with thinning structure. A sense of precarity is certainly evident in a lot of the micro architecture where you've got top heavy where things are. Just in this particular structure you know where there's a greater mass up above. And that is not good for when the ground starts shifting. So, and yet that particular there's something about this that is different aesthetically, and in terms of feeling sublime than something like this. So, oh, I'm Rory I don't think you're sharing the screen. Okay, let me try to reshare. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks. Sorry, I thought you guys could see the application here. Okay. So can you guys see it now. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Okay, so. Yeah, so in terms of the aesthetics of this so the, the, what the visitor's impression might be. Let's say we're standing under this. We've got something like this going on this reminds me of in a second teacher remember they had that cut away for the clear story passage which made the pier seem very small. So, if you've got something like that, and you're able to just get it to stand.  Okay, so that has a completely different feel than this. And so, we've also talked about how high needs to be high enough so again, we've got the same amount of floor area. But we've got this great, great cost increasing costs for going higher and higher. And then are we trying to make it sort of more precarious or top heavy. So, yeah, so that's the thing about these design goals with height, precarity span and area. Now span is an interesting one, because span talks to utility right in terms of a larger congregation and the church, or a building. And it doesn't use that much more stone a little bit more stone so you know we the difference here is from 253 tons of stone 254 tons of stone and not being stable, we just add a little bit more stone. But of course we have to have the technology of how to cut the wedge shape blocks. Where the center of the circle is eccentric to the center of the arch. So the client says well it's going to be a greater span but we're starting to run out of our stone budget. So, we have to start sending things out a little bit to use the same to be within our stone budget. And then there is still the height thing now that as we go higher with that same span. We have a sort of lever here so the exact same horizontal force generated by the arch is going to be more destructive than if that same horizontal force has a lower lever to go here. So, that's the thing does the, does the Bishop say is our is our our patron our client. In the case of Bovet the Bishop really really really really was desperate and this much we do know from historical documents for the tallest cathedral ever built. And so the span has to give so the span above a cathedral is not not that great, compared to say sans cathedral. But if you really want to go for height, then you've got to reduce the span. So, looking at some of the the models that have been submitted so far. So for height, we've got Jonathan. It's pretty dramatic lead in there, Jonathan. I think it must have something to do with the house how small that is and how pointy that is the keystone so this is just one big keystone here which is pretty cool. And so, Jonathan has a height of 208 meters. And Yan was going for height as well, the two. And, yeah, I was going for height 56. So, for the people competing for the tallest structure, you might say that. Okay, these guys didn't do quite as well because they're in the 50s 60s. And maybe Jonathan won the race for the race for height. However, it's no earthquake.  It survived. Okay, so it totally, it totally works. No way. So, let's see. Okay, so not as tall and more precarious for that particular earthquake. Looks like it's going to make it. All right, so interesting. So, this particular structure is just hanging in there. Didn't quite make it, but so height is 56.5 and the precarity is quite high at 32,000 so that the precarity is the weight of each block times it's height above the ground summed up with all of that and so that that is the same precarity score. So, Jonathan has a higher precarity as well. But where Jonathan doesn't compete so well, and not that he was trying to is on span. So, 1.4 meter span. 5.3 5.5. Yeah. But in the race for height, I think it's, I think Jonathan kind of took it with that incredibly daring structure. Now, the thing about testing with earthquake is the amplitude in terms of the furthest that the ground moves is is one attribute the frequency is another so it might have a small amplitude but be shaking very quickly. So, this is a high fairly high frequency and a very low amplitude. All right, so let's take a look at. And of course duration is another factor so the, the longer that it's going on and shaking. So I've got this right now in a linear dampening means that the ground shifting starts out strong and keeps going small and smaller until it's zero. But when you have a higher duration and it's going to go. It's going to just do that much more damage to the structure. Okay, so let's take a look at span. So, so Jen has has generated this span of 35.5 meters. And Alex also went for span, he's got 37.6. Okay, so it's just so Jen versus Alex to who can make their respective cities prouder for the greatest span church. And, sorry. Okay, so that was Alex's. Let's try so Jen's. So kind of similar. Now, I think when you made this, it probably was a taller structure and then when you brought it down the size of the coursing was still big and that that was an earlier version, I think last night's version was still doing that and then I added a fix. And the first version released today, I believe, so that when you make it smaller it tries to also reduce the coursing size. So but that's still an interesting thing too to think of these very large these very long. Okay, so at this, at some point there's an earthquake that one of these would probably stand and the other one wouldn't. And also right now the earthquakes are shaking the ground, you know exactly this way and in plane of the structure. Okay, so Jen's stood and Alex's, but the earthquake could also depending on where the epicenter of the earthquake is the horizontal ground movement could be going this way, which would have a totally different behavior. So there's so much variation just in the test of the quakes. The medieval builder would build these buildings or the ancient builder, there'd be no telling when that building would be put to what test. And so in the case of Hagia Sophia it's very, very don't very experimental dome very high up with a with a great span with tons and tons of buttressings. The Byzantines, one of their solutions was they weren't worried so much about light and dematerializations of walls they just purchased everything, but then the earthquake was just too much, and it hit an earthquake that was just too much for it. Yeah, so span is certainly a precarious thing to to think about. But certainly gives you in the building, the most floor area for for activities. Okay, it seems like we've got four people who went for precarity. So 40,000 Edward 10,000 Eduardo 10,000 Gabriel 20,000 and you then. Which of these is the most sublime. We should add a person here to get to give a good sense of scale. So are the ones with the greater precarious a precarity level, more sublime. What do you guys think I think so yeah. But the difference between the 40,000 one and the 10,000 one, I think in terms of so blind is not that different, but. Okay, so use you on is the 40,000 and Eduardo is also sublime I agree I think I think this is. You know it's funny. It's this little notch here that does it. Without a lot of great height, there's something about this. Now let's say we are this tall. So this, this overhang this cantilever with all this weight on top. And if it goes higher is it. Is it more so long. I think the heavier the top gets the most and more sublime it is right. I'm finding the hard. Yeah, because it's since it's in the virtual sort of like our perspective is is kind of unrealistic in a way, and it's in it. It's true. Yeah, it's it's a sort of abstract, just sort of tectonic thing but it's, I feel like maybe being sublime also has something to do with being well proportioned, instead of just like looking on realistic. Mm hmm. Well, well, well, well proportioned. How do we, how could we qualify that. How could we sort of what would be the characteristics of well proportioned. It's because you might say you might say this is there's proportioning, there's sort of different things that you could do in terms of the, the, the, the, the, you know the various relative sizes, and scales of things that was I think many of them can be beautiful. So is it is a well proportioned a beautiful thing or a ability to generate a little bit more of a sensation of fear of peril. I would say it's probably both. So it's staring away that it's aesthetically pleasant. And then how much of that aesthetically pleasant might be personal preference for each each viewer versus kind of more a priori apprehension of, you know, either the mathematical sublime was like, wow, what is that how many blocks are in that I, I, I'm having trouble sort of, and to also yeah, to the point of that this is an abstract thing. We still can have some mathematical sublime kick in with trying to to apprehend the sort of pieces of these and how they repeat up through a very tall structure, but there's also a dynamics of line in the sense of of engaging with is that you know like what is that is that going to is that going to fall on me. But it's but it's also like in classical architecture, it was sort of cannot come up with sorry. Yeah, you kind of cannot come up with an explanation of why things are proportioned in a certain way, even though you could mathematically analyzing them, but and I sort of believe that if you perceive something to be aesthetically pleasant, then it also means that subconsciously it works in a rational way for you and that's make it to appear to be well proportioned. Because if you see something like this in reality would almost assume that it just would not stand. And for me that it's not pleasant to look at, even though it's really precarious, I guess. But as we as we learned with content doesn't have to be pleasant to be sublime. So sublime means it's you're sort of taken out of yourself, you're, you're, you're becoming engaged with something outside of yourself. And it's not necessarily pleasurable in the sense of just apprehending beauty, it's, it's pleasurable in the sense of I am now outside of myself. So there's that distinct distinction that Kant makes between pleasure and sublime of apprehension of something, you know, like the example of the storm, but you're safe in your armchair. So if you really think the building's going to fall on you, then that's not necessarily sublime and that's just fear. But if it's standing and let's say it stood for 200 years and you're at the base of it, you may not be literally afraid it's going to fall on you, but you can't help but to think of your fearful of it without being afraid. Anybody else. This, this definition also it relates to that that reading that we had about the giants right. That's right. So something that's something that's kind of huge, gargantuan and somehow surreal.  You're saying it's still can be sublime. Yeah, oh, definitely. Yeah, according. Yeah, yeah. Well, and of course, we recall in Dante the giants are it turns out that they're, they're chained so they're, you know, at first there's that, that that misconception of what they were there were towers at first and then it turns out, as he gets closer it's not towers it's giants, but then there's this relief that the giants are changed and chained and can't hurt him so it's, it's that it's that again it's that fear, sort of fearful without literally being afraid so so at first. There was a the author, the narrators afraid, but then that fear gets sort of downgraded to just a sort of fearfulness of the awesomeness of it of its size. In the case of buildings that fear is is perhaps not present for us say, and when we're in a medieval building today because we're so used to still heroic steel stadium ceilings and things like that and maybe there's just a sort of built in assumption that's something that's only 2530 meters wide is just not that going to be that dangerous and nothing to even consider and then maybe then we're just looking at the the the sort of serene, you know qualities of light and material that are also add to a sublime effect, but the fear part of it is not structural daring, maybe not entering into it. But if you're in a world stone only and you've seen collapses and you know it's heavy stone there's no tensile structure supports. If you see enough of even these collapses in the simulation. Then, and you know that all of the buildings that you encounter all the monumental buildings that you encounter excuse me in the world are made of this kind of fabric then at some point your understanding of of the building would probably be different than ours today. So does anybody have any other models to submit? Rory, do you have my model? I tried to upload it but I think I couldn't. Do you see my model? I don't see yours, no. Do you want to share your screen with us? Can I just ask one thing that I was having issues with the Canon actually that it was facing the camera instead of Yes, there's a bug there and the best way to avoid that bug is be far away from the structure when you go into Canon mode. Oh, I see. Okay. I guess that's another thing we should try is for the people who have uploaded or is to try to take a crack at shooting them down. Is it a screen now? Yeah. I don't know why it's super tiny. I see. Yeah, so I guess the your screen resolution is such that the libraries are being cut off. Yeah. Okay. So that's not that interesting, but I mean, I think this is the target area. It's kind of like a balanced span and height and then mostly 100% the quake. I don't know how good it is. Just try that. As long as it's not falling on us, we're happy. Right. Okay. Yeah. So you might say, Hey, that's survived the quake. Maybe I'll just try to increase the area a little bit. Yeah. Not that crazy as Jonathan's, but I just made like a tower like 75 meters. I hope it's live. Yeah, just that. Nice. Good. So actually, yeah, so anybody else have it, maybe you couldn't upload it to the server, but you want to share it. So yeah, the simulation could be improved by, of course, having more elaborate structures that, but even just a simple arch, we can get quite an understanding of the kinds of things that ancient medieval builders were dealing with. And yeah, it's interesting to, you know, so you get used to the simulation, but then it's interesting to reflect on how builders were taking great chances by lost in these buildings and then pulling the centering framework out and seeing if the arch was going to stand or not. So here we can just do that very quickly. And you know, it's, it's my guess is that their greatest concern was will it just stand when you pull the centering away. So for us, we just let go of a handle and we just see right away if it's going to collapse. But the, you know, it is curious to think of how much did they think about, okay, I can't make this thing as tall as my patron would like or as wide, but I want to make sure that it doesn't collapse 50 years from now during during an earthquake. So, you know, it's if you think of what we were seeing with the example of micro architecture that Alex was showing us the desire to do that kind of dematerialized structure with a sense of sort of top heavy vaulting or spires and the reality of trying to build it in stone. And just not really knowing if it's going to work until you let the you let the scaffold scaffolding go. And if you recall in the case of Hagia Sophia Anthemist of Tralys was was worried it goes to Justinian he's worried that the the arches are starting to deform and we're not sure exactly which arches are being talked about in Procopius's text but and then Justinian solves the problem for them by saying oh you need you need more buttressing or weight longer before you pulled the centering out or but there is that moment where you could tell they pulled the centering out and things started deforming and cracking so Yeah, that's just a certainly in the case of Justinian Procopius is able to make him a hero who gets the solution, you know from God and hands it to the architect but Yeah, as you're working with the simulation app just sort of think about that you you're trying to push one of these design goals or maybe a couple of them at the same time and you can't really necessarily just push it to your You can't use all of your stone budget pushing it to that extreme that we were seeing in a micro architecture you have to pull back a little and make the buttressing a little wider which means it's going to be not quite as high and so forth so Okay, so for those of you who who didn't submit anything maybe try to submit something by next week and send me an email if you're having trouble you can take a look at them again for for a few minutes and And Because I think that working with simulation will help you with your final projects in terms of look taking some piece of world architecture Ancient or medieval and Being able to present it to us and describe what is it that appears to be structurally daring is is it generating some sort of a sublime effect in you and And then we can all sort of pipe in and share things that we find Structurally daring about it as well and so yeah remember to talk about things in terms of the slenderness of supports The span and Overhang so those are sort of three crucial elements that we can talk about in terms of structural daring without going into engineering and Yeah, so as you sort of just searching for images of buildings a lot of incredible Indian temples and Japanese shrines and so forth. I mean just amazing things going on in terms of presenting structural daring Yeah, so just just show us something that will kind of get us going on like oh my gosh that thing is really daring That makes sense Okay. All right. Well, you have a question. I have a question. Um, you said it's just gonna be kind of like a quick Presentation of like a fly through of images and stuff to kind of just get a feel from everybody in the room. That's right. That's right It just to just to provoke Conversation and and ideas. Yeah, it's so yeah, no no historical Analysis, it's really just a phenomenological Sort of consumption and way to think about what what you're showing us and And so each person should maybe take so we'll I'll send out a list of who will go next week and probably just alphabetical the following week and so Yeah, so maybe think about 10 minutes or so of You know enough to kind of give us 10 minutes of discussion For each project. All right Okay, so thanks guys. Thanks Alex. That was a great presentation and Yeah, and just continue to work with the model and I'll be I'll be watching to see more models show up in the the service thing there And see if anybody can come up with something just really like we haven't seen yet I know it's a limited structure with limited parameters, but You guys I know you guys are creative and can do it Those design constraints right design in the play instinct. Okay. So that's it for today and we'll see everybody next week. All right. Thank you. Thanks guys Alright, thank you. Thanks guys


Hi, my name is Max Offsa. I work here at the 3D Design Studio in Newman Library on Virginia Tech's campus. We offer free 3D printing to patrons of the library and any community members as well. You also can find 3D printing at our various branch libraries, both here in Blacksburg and across the state. The type of 3D printing we typically do here in the library is FDM printing or Fuse Deposition Modeling that usually takes into account an extruding process where we take our 3D model and lay it down layer after layer until we have a full piece printed. You could use sinistration to melt powdered-based plastics with a laser layer by layer until you get a full model. There's also SLA printing where it uses resin as well as UV light lasers to do a similar process. FDM printing and SLA printing is what we have available here in the library. So how do we use 3D printing? Some of the ways you might use it are for your personal projects. You might use it for your academic projects in your class. You may use it for ways to enhance your workspace or your environment at home. You might even use it to make business items, things you might sell or create for others to help them in their endeavors. You can also use it as a teaching tool. You can teach design processes. You could teach by making learning objects that might be hard to come by and represent what you are trying to instruct. You could also use it in art projects. Maybe a sculpture that is something that you might not be able to make by hand, but you can make digitally. You could use it to construct pieces inside of a bigger exhibit that might need special stays or architectural pieces that aren't necessarily available conventionally, but you could make them in 3D print them elsewhere. Let's talk about some 3D printing terminology. So the first thing you need to do any 3D printing is a model. What we need mean by a model is a digital object that we can represent in our digital space and give to our printer. This model can be made many ways. It could be made by yourself in a computer aided drafting program, CAD program, or any number of other types of object rendering programs. The second thing we need is a slicer. Now our slicer is not exactly a model rendering program, as much as it is a thing to take our model and slice it into thin layers that our machine can then take to print. So each of those layers that come out of our slicer are going to be the XY coordinates that our machine needs to be able to lay down filament. Once it lays down that filament, it's going to lay it on top of each other until we get back to our model. So at this point you've got most of the digital side of what we need for our terminology. Model into slicer, slicer to machine. Now where that model is going to be deposited is on the build plate of our printer. The build plate is the physical area on our printer where our model will be built. Its size is what determines how big your model can be. If you have a small build plate, you can only make small models. If you have a big build plate, you can make very big models. It's really just the surface that your models adhere to when they get printed. Next we'll talk about our extruder, which is where our model actually gets deposited from. You can think of your extruder kind of like a hot glue gun. It's really taking our solid matter and heating it up to about 200 degrees Celsius, maybe even up to 230 or 40 Celsius, and getting it molten hot. At that point it's extruded onto our build plate. What we're heating up is our filament. Now the filament is the actual plastic that's fed into the extruder. That's going to be the material that your model is made out of. Most filaments that we use look kind of like a weed eater wire. It's a thin plastic, fairly flexible. Now that stays solid all the way down to the very tip of the extruder. It goes molten liquid right at that point. After it gets laid down, it cools down pretty quickly, almost cool enough to touch so that it can become a solid model. Now what it's going to be laying down with our filament is a layer. Every layer is going to be prescribed as a certain height. That height, which is defined in our slicer, is really the fidelity of your model or really the resolution of your model. So if you set a really small layer height, you're going to have lots and lots and lots of layers to make up your model. If you set a very tall layer height, you're going to have fewer layers and thus a little more of a rough model. You'll be able to feel the layers if you run your fingers across it. Now last we'll talk about really the only other three terms that you need that are essential to talking about 3D printing. So after you've taken your filament, fed it into your extruder, put it onto your build plate, you're actually going to be designing or laying down a model at this point. So the way our printer likes to lay down models is by shell first, which would be the perimeter of the outside of your model. And then infill, which will be whatever is inside your model. Most 3D printed models are not 100% solid. If you pick up a model, you'll feel it's kind of light, lighter than you expected. That's because most 3D models aren't actually solid. They have an infill pattern of some kind. And it can be really any repeating shape or pattern. A lot of times we use squares. Sometimes we use like a honeycomb pattern. You can even use MC Escher's cat faces as a repeating pattern, as long as it can be replicated across the whole face. Other than that, you want to know how to get your model to stick to your build plate. And sometimes models don't want to stick by themselves. So the last term we'll talk about are rafts and brims. A raft is kind of what it sounds like. It's a little piece of plastic for your model to stick to that'll stick to your build plate. A brim is similar, but really it's just going to make a lot of extra outlines of your very first layer of your print. And that's going to help from the model from peeling or warping up off of the build plate. So with all those terms, you have kind of a basic working knowledge of how to talk about 3D printing and what steps it's going through. And what you're going to see in your prints. Now that we have some working terminology to talk about 3D printing, let's talk about how we design our 3D prints. So we talked about brims and rafts. So really that deals with a thing called platform adhesion. And what that is, is how we keep our model from warping or peeling off of our build plate while it's printing. As you might imagine, there's a lot of forces that build up with the printer moving over top of our model and pulling it from left to right. Backwards and forwards as the tool moves. This can cause the model actually to pull away from the build plate and it'll fail. You'll get a whole mess of 3D printing material all over the place. And so when we want to design our 3D print with platform adhesion in mind, sometimes we just want to try to make sure there's a very large flat area for our print to be able to use as a place to stick to the build plate. So if you have maybe a spherical item, you might want to think about making a flat side to it if possible. Or maybe cutting it in half so you have the entire middle circumference and area to use as an area for platform adhesion. And then glue those two pieces together later and then do some post work to finish it off. Another structural design sometimes we have to take into account is how our infills are actually going to make our model stronger or weaker. You might need a piece that has to be close to solid to really hold up to maybe forces that would act on it if you're using it for a mechanical project or something that's going to hold weight. So you would think about making things not too thin to have zero infill or not too thick to be more or less solid. In 3D printing typically we found that you don't really get too much more strength out of your infill patterns once you hit about 50% or 60% infill. At that point the material is probably going to yield or break even if it had been solid. You actually gain some ductility and flexibility from your print by not having it be solid but still have kind of the impact strength you would typically get. So our infill patterns, while it might be something that you want to have a certain structure to, squares, rectilinear squares or honeycombs or something like that, for the most part it doesn't matter too much what that pattern is but it does matter how much of it you put in there. So typically in the studio we run a 20% infill meaning only about 20% of our model is actually solid. But if you need something for more strength you might ask to have that be a larger number, 50% or 60% like I was saying. Something we have to design for as well are overhangs. So in the digital realm we don't have to worry about things like gravity messing with our models but in real life we definitely do. And so an overhang is any space that would be hanging just out into the air over top of our build plate with nothing underneath it. When our model gets to that height and our extruder is trying to path out to that overhang in real life gravity is going to pull all that filament down and it's just going to fall so you'll have a very large drooping area. Now we can add in with our slicing engine support material which is kind of like a scaffold that would build up to our model and have a little platform for that overhang to build on but ideally you don't want to do that. You get a very rough edge and sometimes those scaffolds are fragile and they're easy to fall off of our build plate. So when you do design try to design with the idea that everything can be built on an angle. An angle is kind of something that would stair step and self-support. Another self-supporting structure for overhangs is domes. So a dome outward would self-support from the inside but a dome cut into an object would actually stair step itself all the way to the top and you wouldn't actually have to have an infill pattern. So if you can cut rounded holes through your objects they'll actually self-support and you won't have to worry about having a support structure inside. And that leads kind of to the last thing we really designed for which is bridging. And bridging is whenever you have to take material from one support structure to another like a bridge. So if you had say a C-shaped object and the two ends of the C were on the build plate you'd have that middle bridged area. Now a C is normally a dome but we're thinking more of a three-paneled piece like you see here. So that object would build up till the two pillars are built and then whenever it needed to start going over back and forth that bridged area you would have a little droop in the middle. And that's kind of like an overhang but it's different because it's going to meet other parts of your 3D print. Some machines with proper settings can make a bridge work. Most machines want to only bridge maybe an inch or a little less of distance before they'll start getting a really bad droop. So you can think about it in your model if maybe you want to have those pieces be oriented a different way on your build plate when you try to print them so that the bridges don't have to happen. They can just move upward and build with the model layer by layer. But if you do have to have bridges think about maybe adding some support material in the center so that the bridge is not quite as long and you get less drooping and less defects on your print. Hi everybody we're going to go over a quick tutorial for Tinker Cat. So what you'll need at your disposal is a computer with internet connection and a browser. And that's about it. So when you start you're going to log into Tinker Cat and you do that by clicking sign in here in the top right corner of the screen. If you already have an account with Autodesk you'll just use that sign in otherwise you'll create a new account. It's free just requires an email address. So in our first block here we'll just type in our email address. And then in the second block here password. If you know how to type your password. And then you're in. From here we'll go to create new design. Your page will probably blank and not have anything on it. So you just click this blue box which will be basically the only thing available to you. And then we'll hit the ground running. Alright so before we get into Tinker Cat we need to address some of the things that are on our screen here. Tinker Cat is a visual based CAD software. So it's kind of a middle step between a typical CAD software. CAD being computer aided drafting or computer aided design depending on who you're talking to. Most bigger programs want you to do a few more steps before you get to the step that Tinker Cat has you at. But what the nice thing about Tinker Cat is you can relate it kind of one to one with how you might build with Legos or building blocks. A lot of people are fans of the video game Minecraft and that's a pretty good one to one analogy with how you might make in Tinker Cat. So the headspace we want to be in right now is building with Legos building with blocks. Say I gave you 10 Lego blocks and told you to make a dinosaur. You would make a very very non detailed maybe outline of a dinosaur right?  And so where Tinker Cat kind of comes in is you have the super power to make infinite blocks. So at that point you could set there in stack blocks and stack blocks until you had the most detailed version of a dinosaur you could make just by stacking blocks. It would be a huge object but since we're in the digital space it doesn't really matter because we have infinite void to deal with in our digital space. Now if you try to import that to a 3D printer you might run into some problems. However we want to be thinking about how to build with blocks the way we would go about stacking and grouping and combining in that way. And so on our screen here I'm going to show kind of iterations of design. So if we're going to make a dinosaur we might start with our 2D dinosaur over here and we'll zoom in on him. So he's very flat and single kind of pixelated guy. Our 2D dinosaur here is a little more extruded. He's got a little more depth to him. He's a bit bigger. Our 3rd iteration's got some more detail. He's got teeth, he's got eyes, he's got little hands, he's got spikes on his back. And then our 4th iteration with a lot more work. He's very smooth, he's rounded, he's got cool features. He kind of looks like a god's little monster at that point. So the more time you spend with these softwares the closer you can get to a more detailed object. Alright so let's go over our basic tools in Tinkercad. We'll go back to our space that's blank. You should have this screen that says work plane in the bottom here and it's kind of like a blue square. So your work plane is the space in which you will drag all shapes from our toolbar over here of basic shapes. Before we start dragging shapes in let's go over our viewport and what we're looking at. So on our left side of the screen here we have the view cube and it is labeled on each side what dimension you're looking at. The top, the front, the bottom, left, right and you can just click on it to reorient the space kind of like I'm doing here. The next button here is the home button. It will take you back to this base screen that we started at. It won't erase anything but it will zoom out or zoom in your viewport so that you fill the screen with just your work plane. The second button is for when you actually have an object. It is the fit view. You can type command F which is just F on your keyboard. Anything you have selected on your work plane and then you type this button it will zoom in on that object. So if I drag a box in and I have it selected you can see the anchor points around it and then I click the fit view. It will fill the screen with our object here. We'll go back to the home and zoom back out. The plus and minus buttons are the typical zoom in, zoom out and depending on the computer you're on that might be the mouse wheel roll in and out.  This last button is not one I usually recommend. It switches you between a flat view, an orthogonal view and a perspective view. So as you can see here I switch to the orthogonal view and everything looks very flat and it's geometrically sometimes easier to look at your object this way. But for spatial reasoning purposes perspective is much better. It actually gives you this kind of vanishing point. It makes it look more like you're looking into a 3D window instead of a technical drawing. Alright so now that we have our navigation tools aware of what they're going to do. If we get lost, if we zoom way out and our object's really tiny and we zoom way in and our object's huge we know how to get back to safety now. Alright so let's make our first object and typically our first object is bringing in a cube just like we did earlier.  And this at this point is a 3D object. This is a 20mm by 20mm cube. This is a 3D printable object. That's why Tiggercat is a great first step because you didn't have to go through all the steps of making every side and panel of this object. You were just immediately able to pull in a 3D object. Like we were talking earlier if you wanted to make a dinosaur from this you could just keep dragging and positioning just by click dragging these blocks until you got a dinosaur shape or whatever shape you're going for for whatever project. And so as you can see on the screen here what I'm doing I'm overlapping pieces and it doesn't really matter because there's no real physicality to these pieces. These are digital blocks. They can be pressed inside of each other and you can even add them to each other to make a new shape or you can subtract them away from each other to make other new shapes. And so those are really the other two kind of superpowers that Tiggercat gives you for block building is infinite blocks and then the ability to add a strip tract any shape from another shape to make a wholly new shapes. The only kind of bad thing about Tiggercat is if you get too used to this you might have a harder time with typical CAD softwares where you don't have base 3D shapes. You actually have to draw your base shape and extrude it into a 3D shape. But that's not what we're going over today.  These kind of rough but you can select all these blocks. Click drag selects everything on your screen. So I've selected 16 shapes here. It's always good to look up here in the shapes corner to see what number of shapes you have and kind of how many you wanted to get. It looks like I brought in about 15 blocks. So I guess it was 16 apparently. And so I want to show you one of the these tools up here. It's called the group tool or control G and this will combine any shapes you have on the screen. So when I hit this it's going to make this into one big block and you see all the lines disappeared from the individual blocks. Now this is one shape that when I scooted around it moves in unison because it's now a new singular shape made up of all the blocks we pulled in. So I'm going to fit this back into view. So it's very rough looking. He's got a little eye here. You know, so he's got some features. So let's go over some of our other tools. Workplane is again the place where you're going to bring in your objects. Now you can change where your work plane is and it's very useful to do so. So the work plane button is up here in the top right where you can type W and it's going to give you this little block panel. And if we zoom in and look at it, it actually has a little cone and the cone is pointing what direction is up on our planes or on our plane. So I can make my work plane the top of my dinosaur. I could make it the chin here. I could make it the nose anywhere. I type W and then click and you can see as this plane changes shape as it goes over different surfaces up is now a new direction. And so what doing a new work plane really does for you is when you drag in a new shape, it's at an elevation that you find useful. So I'm going to bring in this roof triangle piece and you can see I brought it on top of my dinosaur here. And so if I typically did that without changing my work plane, it would have come in underneath the dinosaur. So you can see he's in the wrong position. So if you want to put things on top of each other and you don't want to try to manually move them through space because in the digital space, it gets kind of rough finding elevation such you would just type work plane, click on the surface. You want to place your object and then start bringing objects in from there. So this was going to serve as an arm. And so now it's kind of a blocky arm. It's not quite scaled correctly. So what we're going to do is we're going to scale it. You can click on any of these white blocks, which are called anchors. And those anchors are for skewing the object in whatever direction you end up clicking and pulling on it.  It will scale it however you want. It will also scale linearly, meaning it will keep all of its height and width and shape the way you want it by holding Shift while you drag it and it will instead of skew it in one dimension, scale it all linearly together. Alright, so let's make this a little skinnier, a little longer. And now we can see these little arrows on the side that I'm highlighting. So there's three axes to our object here. We got an X, a Y, and a Z. So I'm going to rotate this around our Z axis.  And you can see there's a little degree radial marker. You drag it to whatever degree you want it to. I want it to look, let's see, about 60 degrees off. So I'm giving it a little slant. So now it's kind of a little arm coming off our dinosaur man. Really you can make anything here. Typically the Tinkercad tutorial, if you want to look at those, they have excellent tutorials as well. They go in more depth in other parts of the tools. They have you build a house out of the roof tool and the block tool. I just like making a dinosaur better. So now that we've rotated, we've scaled, we've brought in multiple objects. Let's do Subtract. So earlier we joined all these red blocks together. That is a group command. You can also group a different type of shape here. And what I'm highlighting here on the mouse is solid, which is what all these objects are right now. You can inversely change these to whole, which you can kind of think of as like negative matter. So anything that is combined with a whole piece will subtract away everywhere the whole was. So in this case, we're going to give this guy a mouth. So we're going to scale this whole block so that it's kind of skinny and long. We're going to put it where we would put a mouth. So I'm going to put this over his mouth. And I'm going to overextend it a little bit because it doesn't matter if the hole is outside of our area of interest. Because once we join it, it's just going to disappear. Subtracting matter from where there isn't matter, it's not going to do anything. So you can see it kind of looks like a dinosaur with a sandwich in its mouth right now. So we're going to group these two, the hole plus the dinosaur shape. And there we go.  He looks kind of like an alien dinosaur. I always do this different every time, so it always looks a little different every time. So I'm going to change my work plan again as we've already done. We're going to give him a few teeth. What do you think teeth would be? Cones or roofs, use whichever one you like the best. Maybe he has rounded teeth. You could have little sphere teeth. I'm going to do a cone. Yeah, that's a big tooth. So we're going to hold shift, hold on an anchor, scale it down a little bit. And because we're in 3D space, it is a little difficult to see where he is. So we have to play with our views. That's why we learned them first. All right, so there's a tooth. That looks pretty good. Feel a little like Bob Ross. There's a happy little tooth right there. All right, so you can also use typical copy and paste commands. These are up here in the corner. You can make copies, duplicate is what it calls it. But yeah, control C, control V will copy a piece. Or you can click those buttons I just showed you. If you ever mess up, there is an undo tool. It's control Z or literally this undo button. So if you put something in a weird place, you subtract the thing you didn't want to. You can always click undo and go back to the original. And something we haven't really talked about yet, but this is saving your progress every time you bring something in. So it's live saving to a cloud server that Autodesk runs. So there's no saving, there's no worrying about saving. So if this crashes on you in midway, you should be fine. It should be saving everything as you go. So let's add, finish adding our teeth here. We've got two fangs. That's pretty good. We'll just have the two fangs. Heal needs front teeth. There we go. I think we need a better eye though. We guys think bring the work plane up here. Let's put our half sphere. All right, look at that eye. Nice bug eye. This is going to be interesting dude. What do you think? He's almost more alien than Dinosaur right now. Hopefully yours comes out pretty cool. We get to see it in the studio. All right. So this is the basics of making an object. At this point, you can subtract things. You can add things. You can scale things. You can move them just by clicking and dragging. You learned how to move this cube here. You can just click and drag on that to do a crazy orbit as well. If you guys didn't know how I was doing my orbit, I usually just right click anywhere and hold down and it'll do this kind of freeform orbit. But it doesn't always work that well. So things you might be noticing about the software that have been causing you problems that people don't usually identify. There's a button down here called snap grid. So what that's doing is every time you bring an object in, you might notice there's some kind of clunkiness to moving it around. The snap grid is holding your objects movements to whatever that number is. So right now it's at the one millimeter on mine. If you click this dropdown, you can change it to something to like five millimeters. So it's even clunkier, but it's only moving your objects in five millimeters X, Y, or Z. You can actually just turn it off completely so that everything you move is just by your touch. So if you feel like you're really precise and you really need that fine-tuned movement, you can turn that off entirely and it will be less clunky. So it's a little helpful hint for when you're making your own objects. You can also change this grid from millimeters to inches. You also do it to bricks. This is fully integrated with Lego.  So it's an interesting feature they do. You can also make your build plate in this, your work plane bigger. So this is just at 200 millimeters by 200 millimeters. And then you hit update grid and it changes it to whatever you change it to. Some people work better at inches. Typically in the 3D Design Studio and in 3D Printing General, we use metrics, so we use millimeters. And I guess the only other thing we want to go over is how do you tell how big any of this stuff is. In digital space, this could be 20 feet tall. We have no idea. But there's a ruler tool and that'll tell us what to do. So you can just click this, click anywhere on the page and when you click an object, it'll tell you what size it is. So our dinosaur is 105 millimeters by 93 millimeters. If you ever want to scale it by those dimensions, you can literally just click on the dimension you want to change and type in a number. Maybe I want him to be 110, 120 millimeters and that'll make him a little bit taller. So if you know, kind of like maybe this needs to be a specialty piece that's precision made, it's got to hold all your SD cards and you measured your SD cards to be 10 millimeters wide. You can make it exactly 10 millimeters wide.  So if you make holes, you can make them a little bit bigger. If you make pegs, like things that need to fit into a hole, you can make them a little bit smaller because that plastic is going to expand a little bit and close up your holes and expand your pegs and poles and stuff like that. So if you want to pull new models in or take models out, export will export whatever you have selected. Right now, since I didn't have anything selected, it says, do you want to export everything in design? However, if you just click on individual piece and say export, it's just going to export the piece I selected. So in this case, it's just exporting this red piece. And if we hide these other two pieces, you'll see what that looks like. You can do this light bulb and make them go invisible. So this is just right now only doing this red piece, which means that's not our whole design. So make sure you select everything in your design if you didn't group it before you export. For us, you technically can bring in OBJs, though the way Tinkercad exports OBJs, it gives you a material texture file, which you won't need for 3D printing. So we always suggest exporting .stls. And then for importing, if you had a model you wanted to import, you would click import here, and then you would choose the location of the file. And as long as it's small enough to be loaded, which the file sizes are listed right here, 25 megabytes, it should load into Tinkercad. And you can edit it with all the same tools that you used to create an original model. If you have more questions or ideas or things that you need consultations with, feel free to contact the 3D Design Studio at our website.