ABSTRACT

Periscope Tower was the winning design proposal for "10Up", an Atlanta, GA-based competition, which was defined in part by its very tight constraints. Periscope is 50' tall and was mounted in only six hours. The internal form of the tower is separated from the billowing exterior form, it is defined instead by the two conical forms linking the sky and the viewer on the ground, as a freeform version of James Turrell's installations. The tower was constructed using an inventive combination of robotic fabrication with a hot-wire cutter end-effector. The hot-wire cutter is exactly what it sounds like, a hot-wire which vaporizes polystyrene foam as it moves through a block of it. The expanded polystyrene (EPS) foam which was used here is 98" air by volume and costs about $1 per cubic foot. The foam can be produced with no CFCs and can also be manufactured to be nearly 100" recyclable.