Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/9706
n n n n Architecture started using 3D modeling to show ideas.” Troughout his career, Gunning had tried various software programs prior to standard- izing on Modo in 2004. “I was excited be- cause finally there was a 21st century 3D modeling program that didn’t have all this bloated code floating around in the back- ground,” Gunning says. “I can fly around, play with the design, change bits and pieces, and the results are immediate.” For this project, as he does for all his archi- tectural endeavors, Gunning drew concepts by hand and modeled them in Modo, moving back and forth between the drawings and the 3D model. “My current dissatisfaction is in the lack of tight linkage between Modo and the drafting program we use, [Nemetschek’s] Vec- torworks. Te program is okay, but I feel like I am using systems from two different millennia and not getting the most out of it,” he says. For the LEGO house, Gunning used Modo to not only get a feel for the design, but to com- municate the concepts easily and efficiently. Usually that is in the form of presentations to clients, but in this scenario, the use was twofold: to generate an overall design and explore the layout of the house, and to convey the unique instructions for assembling the LEGO bricks into blocks, or components. Both required the ability to quickly duplicate instances of geom- etry, and to accomplish that, Gunning’s group wrote a number of Python scripts to generate the larger bits and pieces of the house. For instance, “creating instructions for build- ing the roof pyramids could have been time consuming, but instead we were able to write a simple script that created the roof pyramids quickly from our virtual LEGO set,” Gunning explains. “It can get confusing counting bricks on something like that because on each course there is a different amount of bricks, and you just can’t say, ‘I am adding two bricks here each time.’ You need to know which types of bricks you are adding each time you do so. Know- ing what the logic of the structure was, I could generate the whole of the pyramid, and at the same time, the script could tell me how many and what types of bricks were in it.” 34 April 2010 Well over three million LEGO bricks were used to build the full-scale house. Some pieces, such as the people figures (top, left), were donated by the public. Other pieces were used for constructing the exterior and interior (top right). Gunning also used Modo to create basic components for the house, each containing several hundred LEGO pieces. In essence, the LEGO house would comprise thousands of smaller “houses,” some with windows, some serving as roof pyramids, and some as hollow blocks that would be used for the structural beams. With Modo, Gunning was able to ex- plain how to create prototype components that would be tested, and then later, how the ap- proved components should be assembled and combined to complete the overall structure. Te software also enabled the crew to de- sign a pleasing outside aesthetic with the multi-colored bricks. Initially, the group did Modo renderings with random bricks, which was what May had in mind. “It just looked mad,” Gunning says. “Instead, working with the interior designer Christina Fallah, we came up with a design that emphasized stripes, giv- ing it a bold, graphically strong look.” Construction Plans According to Gunning, Modo gave the de- sign team a feel for the material quality of the LEGOs in a large-scale structure well before any components were assembled. LEGOs are quite strong, he says, and when they are pieced together, they stay together nicely. (Te larger, chunkier LEGOs are less sturdy when joined together.) However, LEGOs can be pulled apart by a three-year-old quite easily. “Tat makes it difficult to use LEGOs for most con- ventional building projects,” he adds. To determine the exact limitations of this novel building material, Gunning contacted Neil Tomas and Eva Wates of structural engineers Atelier One; they had pointed out, “quite surprisingly,” Gunning adds, that while you can pull the bricks apart easily, there were a number of LEGO plates that have amazing tensile strength. “Neil suggested how we could build beams with a system of hollow bricks and joists that played to the compression strength of the bricks and the plates,” Gun- ning recalls. “We realized then how we could get the floors in and a roof on the house. It was more straightforward than we had expected.” In actual construction, finite-element anal- ysis is used to determine the limitations of the building materials. But because LEGO is not a known building material, it would have taken upwards of a year to do the proper research and analysis. With only three months to get the house designed and built, the architects had to come up with an alternate solution. Tests on individual bricks provided some of the required information, and large-scale pro- totyping helped determine what worked and what did not. “Te best way of working out what we could do structurally with the LEGOs was to test the big components and the beams, and see what happened.” Tey began building beams that could span two meters (about six to seven feet). Tis was met with a variety of “exciting” experiences, with the early versions collapsing easily. “We played around with this undulating wall plan, but when we mocked that up, it was a bit too flexible,” Gunning recalls. “One eve- ning we loaded up a whole section mockup of the building, with over half a ton of material, until the beams collapsed. Tere were thousands of LEGOs on the floor,” recalls Gunning. “All the LEGOs were fine, so we just picked them up and made something else with them.” Te trick, though, was to conserve the num- ber of bricks being used while making the structure secure. After a month, the group had redesigned the building using hollowed blocks that could support James May’s weight as he walked around the house. However, the pro- duction company’s insurers would not allow construction to start unless a parallel timber frame was “sleeved” by the hollow segments. “We then had to redesign the house again to make it work with the timber columns,” says Gunning. “Making the timber coordinate with the LEGO was difficult; the timber column could hit the LEGOs and damage them.”