ABSTRACT
Material Formations in Design was a course offered by Kevin Rotheroe at the Yale School of Architecture. The products created for the course tested how patterns cut into sheet material can release the sheet to form into complex surfaces. This type of effort stands in contrast to conventional practices, which articulate tessellation patterns to form predetermined surfaces. The course was formulated to remove variables from a form-generating system in an effort to create explorations akin to scientific experiments. The students are asked to reverse course and predetermine a cut pattern, which is then capable of being mapped to a variety of surfaces. The diamond-cut pattern was an attempt to respond to specific surface definitions, by scaling and shifting the pattern as the surface flowed from tighter to wider radii of curvature. This variation could employ more complex models to map curvature as a parametric link to the size of the triangulation.
