Concept Statement/Reading/Connections

Throughout the beginnings of my project, the primary driver has been the evolution of Compressed and Liquified Natural Gas as an economical and environmentally friendly alternative to gasoline in the long run. With large Natural Gas Reserves throughout the country, and less than 10% dependency on foreign sources, I found it to be a great basis for the future of car fuel. Also, a primary driver for the formal aspects of my project has been that of the turning radius of a car and the realms of the car and the person and how to separate the two in order to bring comfort and encourage people to leave their cars while refueling.

With Regards to the reading for today, I found three interesting and related topics:

Metals:

Triangulated Metal Composite Frame

Primarily, I thought that this just looked incredibly cool and showed a little bit about the transference of forces, which would go along with my displaying of the compression process for natural gas. It would make a great material for the rings themselves as it is very sturdy, especially with the dual layering.

Fabrics:

Jelara [Bi-Elastic Fabric Knitted with Teflon and Polyester]

Jelara is a flexible elastic fabric which combines the UV resistant qualities of Teflon yarn with a new highly elastic yarn with no polyurethane - because it degrades in UV light, ruining the possibilities of prolonged outdoor use.

Lighttex [Fabric Light Control Panels]

Somewhat of an alternative to my roofing solution, these screen like fabrics will provide shade, some privacy and enormous interest to the roof plane of my structure should they be used.

In terms of relation to other readings, I feel that my design correlates with the Staib reading in that he laid out the evolution of prefabrication and component/modular systems. I feel that my design is very much modular, much like the first iron frame constructions, in which single sectional (single plane geometries) pieces are made and brought to the site and connected in the remaining axis and made into a volumetric shape. In my design, pieces would be shipped as flat, rings which have no volume (outside of the hollow cavity used for running electricity and natural gas). The volume of the structure would come from connecting the pieces together with the tensioned fabric overhead after all of the pieces have been laid out, much like in Iron Architecture when the pieces would be erected and the final step was to simply put glass and iron facades on the structure. My rings will act as the structure in these examples.