Helix - Matter Design

We have a pre-occupation with the trans­la­tion of ancient and often lost meth­ods into con­tem­po­rary cul­ture and prac­tice. Helix is a prod­uct of an ongo­ing research agenda that cen­ters on vol­ume as an area of archi­tec­tural exploration.

Helix is a half-scale spi­ral stair. While this reduced size resolves a num­ber of prac­ti­cal concerns—weight, lia­bil­ity, access—the piece cel­e­brates its imprac­ti­cal­ity. It is both col­umn and stair, yet hangs from the ceil­ing. Its uncer­tainty and changed scale inject play­ful char­ac­ter­is­tics into the sur­round­ing space, while main­tain­ing an alle­giance to the past and known.

A sec­ond pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of ours is what we term “plas­tic rhetoric”. The solid, heavy, and vol­u­met­ric action of cast­ing con­crete trans­forms a liq­uid mat­ter into a solid mass that wants to crack. The stair’s rounded, plas­tic, and cur­va­ceous treads reflect the material’s ear­lier liq­uid state. Its twist­ing accel­er­ates as it wraps around the sup­port col­umn, appear­ing to re-plasticize the fig­ure. The entire construct’s organic and mal­leable appear­ance is coun­ter­in­tu­itive in light of the zero-tolerance sys­tem of nest­ing and key­ing from unit to unit.

Spi­rals are ubiq­ui­tous across cul­tures and times. Helix is our spiral.

The stair is pro­duced with pre­cast unre­in­forced con­crete. These treads are unre­in­forced to test some claims as the team move closer and closer to stone as a test­ing mate­r­ial. Unre­in­forced con­crete has lit­tle to no ten­sile capac­ity mak­ing this project a struc­tural pro­to­type in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Matthew John­son of Simp­son Gumpertz & Heger. Each tread is cast in a fully encap­su­lated cus­tom mold. These molds are rub­ber with a solid wood mother-mold to clamp the assem­bly together. The molds are vibrated rig­or­ously dur­ing the pour­ing process and then imme­di­ately steamed for twelve hours to cure...

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