Design and Fabrication of a ruled surface vault with the Exquisite Corpse

Abstract

This paper describes the adaptation of the Exquisite Corpse to the design of a vault, cut using only ruled surfaces. The Surrealist process of the Exquisite Corpse, where a group of artists work collectively on a single drawing, without seeing the work of their collaborators, Salvador Dalí called working in “semi-darkness”. This method succeeds however in producing complex combinations of forms that rarely emerge from solo designers. When a project arose for a vault in a remote environment, the Exquisite Corpse was chosen to generate complimentary and juxtaposing forms from which an architectural language could be later assembled. A model of the vault was fabricated using a robotic arm with a custom built nichrome wire foam cutting end effector from 107 billets of expanded polystyrene. The discussion notes the stereotomic challenges, the differences between the modelled outcome and its stone version, and reflects on maintaining “semi-darkness” during early stages of form design.