week 1: folding and modelling

The designer I chose as my inspiration for the paper folding task was John Graham Jr. He's most notable for his (sometimes disputed) design of the Seattle Space Needle, but he has also worked on many projects, including high rise office buildings, government buildings and hotels. As an interesting side note, he holds the patent for the design of spinning top sections to towers, most commonly used as revolving resaurants.

The thing that got me interested in John Graham Jr was a lego architecture model of the Space Needle I was given as a gift from an uncle earlier this year. I collected a lot of lego as a kid, but this was by far the coolest lego thing I ever had.

So of course one of the buildings I used as inspiration for my paper folding was the Seattle Space Needle:

This is my folded paper model for the Needle:

And this is my 3D model of it, done in Google Sketchup:

The second building I used as inspiration was the Chase Tower, in Rochester NY. I used this because of the stripped pattern that runs along it, as I thought that would transition well onto a paper model.

With my paper model, I focused on the image of the lines running up the building, as well as the slight curve at the very bottom. On paper, this translated into a series of raised lines, which curved as they met the bulk of the paper.

Spore Creature Creator:
These are the three creatures I made using the Spore Creature Creator program.

The first one is just a simple bird.

 The second creature is meant to be something like the giant Sarlacc from Star Wars (a big spiky mouth in the sand). I was watching Star Wars at the time and thought it would be fun to try and make it.

 The third creature is a dragon type monster. I had trouble making a tail, but I think it looks ferocious enough without one.