The GFRC Furniture Studio, taught by Glenn Wilcox, focused on material explorations of high performance glass fiber reinforced concrete and robotically bent steel rod to create custom furniture pieces. This project focused on the creation of a language of interlocking connections formed by the steel rod, and the creation of thin, smooth GFRC shells with carbon fiber reinforcement. We began with the design of a stool and expanded to develop a larger collection of furniture around a library of connection typologies. Without access to the fabrication facilities due to COVID-19, we focused our efforts on honing the designs based on their structural performance and constructability through the use of structural analysis and robotic simulation software.

The result of this design process was compiled into an 80 page set of fabrication drawings. These drawings consist of assembly diagrams, structural analysis, dimensioned orthographic drawings, and 3D PDFs along with the accompanying fabrication files (CNC GCode, Kuka KRL files, etc). The drawings and files are ready for fabrication upon the reopening of the Taubman Fabrication facilities.