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The 3D Printing Challenge Results

Congratulations to the Space Odyssey 2017 design team for winning our 3D Printing Challenge! This fall, we partnered with Entuitive and challenged five cross-company teams from six offices to design a 1:50 scale pavilion using assembled 3D printed pieces. The final entries were presented at our annual Ontario Health Achieve reception, held on November 6th, where clients and staff voted on the most innovative design.

About the Challenge

As a firm, we have been producing 3D prints to enhance communication with clients and to boost project development. This challenge demonstrates how Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and Stereolithography (STL) printing technologies can be used as a collaborative design and mock-up tool.

Parkin’s designers from Ottawa, Vancouver, and Toronto partnered with Entuitive structural engineers from Toronto, Calgary and the U.K. While all fives teams effectively showcased 3D printing as a successful collaborative tool, it was Team 3 who took home the $1,000 cash prize (and bragging rights)!

Team 1: Meeting Across the River

This team’s design expresses their distance – 5,356 km apart (Parkin’s Ottawa team and Entuitive’s London, U.K. team), and interprets the similarities between their locations, from the rivers and canals to the changing of seasons.

The purpose of this pavilion is to bring people together. A symmetrical design, straddling both land and water, this seasonal and multi-use pavilion can be used for activities such ice skating, swimming, theatre or reading and enjoying the outdoors. 

Team 2: Dancing Parasol: Dynamically Intertwined

This pavilion explores dynamic and responsive architectural forms through integration of lightness, translucency and kinetics. The shape and lightness of the parasol forms would be turned by the breeze; rotating the interwoven axes to animate the cast and pattern of shadows on the pedestrian space below.

The rendered concept explores the addition of colour to the pavilion’s design to add a kaleidoscopic effect. 

Team 3: Space Odyssey 2017 | The Winning Design

The team’s pavilion design was inspired by the mysteries of balancing forces in nature interpreted as exterior shells.

Recent news headlines around a neutron star collision conjured thoughts of what “ends and beginnings” mean in the scope of the universe. The pavilion captures the two stars spiraling dynamic as they circled each other in sculptural form. Here, two mirrored shell pieces continually chase each other as they seek balance.

Team 4: The Think Tank Pavilion

This pavilion is a concept exploration inspired by the City of Toronto’s partnership with Google on the “Sidewalk Labs” initiative.

The form expresses a series of collapsing wave shapes through a series
of modular, curling architecture forms and structures that offer sheltered space for reflection and community interaction. Translucent skin provides openness and emphasis of the pavilion’s structural form.

Team 5: Momentum Pavilion

Inspired by a frozen Canadian landscape, the dialogue between the pavilion’s curvilinear walls and smooth serpentine path swerving between the moguls that compose the roof point to different elements of a wintery journey. Following the winter sport theme, the structure is derived from the geometry of the shell, utilizing a flange form reminiscent of skis to support the skin of the pavilion.

The pavilion offers a combination of shelter from the elements and openness to the landscape’s vistas in any season.

This isn’t the first time we’ve successfully partnered with Entuitive. For Toronto’s 17th Annual Canstruction competition we created a 3D coffee cup composed entirely of cans of food. Our joint creation, the Cappuccino Cup, received an award for Best Use of Labels and one of eight Canstruction International awards from more than 1200 submissions!

Learn more about the competition and the different phases:

 

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