Event 2: Hammer Museum

I recently visited The Hammer Museum and saw some work from the Heatherwick Studio. Although there were a number of interesting pieces, several pieces stuck out to me and related directly to my engineering background.

 Photo Credit: Calvin Sung

The first piece that was extremely interesting was called “Spun” I believe. Once you sat in it, you could shift your body weight and have the chair rotate about the pivot point on the ground. This related to my first physics class that discussed angular velocity given by the equation

ω = dθ / dT

Cross Section of the "Spun" Piece

Depending on your center of gravity and how much force you applied, you could control the rotation speed of the art piece. The best part was that it was an interactive art piece where a bystander can not only touch the art, but also interact with it and produce some kind of result. In this case, it was simply spinning myself in circles endlessly. With this interaction, I was also able to employ my education of basic physics and understand what was physically occurring with this unique piece.

 Video Credit: Calvin Sung

One of the other pieces on display was a model of a new learning hub done for Nanyang Technological University. The building consisted of a number of circular buildings taking the general shape of a cylinder. Each cylinder was made up of smaller cross sections stacked on top of each other with a garden on top. Although geometrical and mathematical in nature, the tapper of each cross section of each cylinder moves the structure away from symmetry. 

Scale Model of Learning Hub

The last piece that was very intriguing to me was the rolling bridge. Initially I was really skeptical of the feasibility of such a device on any reasonable scale. But upon closer inspection and research, it appears the studio had already made one that can have someone walk across it. The project starts out as an octagon and splits at the top rolling out each section that produces a walkway.

Scale Model of the Rolling Bridge

These three projects reinforced the idea that art and engineering have a firm place together. I often get caught up with all of the technical details of a project and lose track of the artistic aspects and fail to realize sometimes that just because something is atheistically pleasing does not make it impossible technically. However this studio display mediated that gap and reminded me of the how even amazing engineering feats can be beautifully designed.