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The device that helped a baby breathe again, custom designed and 3D printed.

3D printed bioresorbable splint helped save a baby's life

3D printing is used often in the design world to model things that you couldn't model manually (i.e. by hand) and the printers are getting more and more affordable, with some even becoming 'open source', so you can make your own using a design on the internet. The range of applications stretch to even the 3D printing of most of a gun, which is shocking and slightly disturbing.

3D printed cast for splint

Now there is a story of a bioresorbable splint being made by much finer biomedical processes that involve the scanning and modelling of a baby's breathing tube. Thanks to the University of Michigan and Glenn Green, M.D, with the cast (shown above), a skeleton can be made to help the breathing tube not collapse and then in 3 years time it will be reabsorbed into the body. There's engineering, medical design and materiality playing a big part in this innovation.

What's more, this concept may be able to be applied to other medical conditions. The custom made nature of the technology means that it is adaptable and with bodies being different from one to the other it will be great to see where this all goes.

Thanks to +Alice Pan for the heads up. It's been a few weeks since I've blogged - yesterday I had my mid-year presentation. Hopefully I'll find time to blog about it though! For other blogs on Creative Collision about science (and it does exist here as a category), visit the Science section.

Drawing

I've been drawing a section right along my site at Balmoral, showing what I can do with the space and incorporating the lessons I have learned from my research on the Chinese architectural traditions.

Drawing board architecture architect layered drawing
My drawing board, trying to keep a presence to all of the other drawings/content I've created including the drawing of the ancestral house, layered drawings and photo studies.

Photoshop layer drawing Capitol Cinema
This section cuts through the ridge beam and also has prints of old drawings of the striking Capitol Cinema building worked in.

Vibrant

Tiffany Leong architecture thesis project Chinatown
Tiffany Leong's thesis project worked with the Vancouver Chinatown.

Today I happened across (yet another) thesis project about the Chinatown. I've found each thesis I've seen has a different take on the subject and this one is no different. This time it was about Vancouver's Winnipeg Chinatown, one of the largest in North America.
The project came from a 5th generation Chinese Canadian, honouring the memory of the iconic Shanghai Restaurant that her great-grandfather had championed. None of the younger generation wanted to take on the restaurant - there are many cases that I know of here in New Zealand.

Tiffany Leong creates a small scale intervention on the site to the former restaurant. It rises two stories, with a roof inspired by Chinese paper art. It is at the street level that this scheme shows the momentum of the Chinatown condition - a transparency and porosity with the help of pocket doors, louvres and folding partitions. What this does is create human-scale connections that blur the line between public and private. It also draws inspiration from the hidden passages and spaces typical of Chinatowns around the world.

It can be said that Chinatowns were created by the circumstances of the time of formation - Chinatowns are now used very differently from the past. They are less ethnic enclaves (a response to racial discrimination and abuse) and more 'vibrant' communities with a mix of interesting eateries. It can be argued that this typology is not relevant in today's day and age, too. Without a formal Chinatown, Auckland now has pockets of predominantly Chinese areas ('predominantly' because there are many other cultures alongside - Thai, Japanese, Indian, Middle Eastern) and any intervention would have to be inclusive. This may or may not have a role for Chinatown spatial typologies which is why I am not looking only at 'Chinatowns' and their countless examples, but further back drawing inspiration upon the roots of Chinese culture.

Layer


Experimenting with my transparent butter paper sketches and bringing them into the 3D. Good bases for modelling off. You can see the ancestral altar sitting on one of the top tier near the ridge beam condition - I've yet to determine the nature of this ridge beam and its raising.


I've drawn different conditions: screening, rising, semi-private, alcoves. I'll have to sort out a strategy for arranging these conditions and spaces. I have some ideas of an axis moving through in spreading out vertically into these different spaces.

Ridge

Drawing ridge beam detail Chinese hall

At the moment, I'm focusing on the ridge beam and its importance in the tradition Chinese house. The book Yin Yu Tang states that the beam is more symbolic than structural. How can this be so when it is the highest building member of the frame? There is a saying in Chinese - 上梁不正下梁歪, which, in true Asian style, summarises the following in 7 thoughtful characters: if the ridge beam is crooked, then the lower members will also be crooked. This describes the Chinese house as the family within it - the association is so powerful that it is almost metaphor, just as one family member is not only themselves (as is in the individualistic Western cultures) but their whole family collective.

A real flower ball complete with a tassel.

There is also a ceremony for raising this beam. In the traditional close-knit village, everyone would be invited around for a feast and a red 'flower ball' would be attached to the ridge beam, which would sometimes be painted red. They would also perform the ritual of paying respects to the ancestors with an altar, sticks of incense, and offerings of food. A similar ceremony takes place when the site is selected too, the purpose to have the ancestors overseeing the process and imbuing the communal happiness into the house even from the early stages.

architectural model flower ball Chinese ceremony
Imposing this importance on the Balmoral site model, marking its being in the space. Also did studies of seeing it from the street above the silhouette of facades.

As I started drawing the ridge beam detail of my ancestral hall, I noticed most of it had corroded with age. Very little of the relief sculptures could be made out. So how would I find out what the symbolism was? To me, it isn't really all that important to know exactly what the symbolism is. The usual symbols can be expected of course: dragons (energy/power), phoenix (longevity, renewal), various fruits and flowers (fertility, to have sons). There's also plenty of symbolism underneath the roofline, protected by its shadow. In a way it gives me the space to create my own symbolism on this beam for my architecture - one that talks of Chinese here in Aotearoa as a shared land.

Dirt

Roland Reiner Tiangco's 'Dirt Poster' is only for those who get their hands dirty, a call to action as much as a clever way to communicate a message. 




Can't be more true, in my opinion.