Synapse by Rob Ley Studio is a fully suspended art installation located in the Lewis Integrated Science Building at the University of Oregon in Eugene. The steel tube network traverses multiple floors of atrium space and is hung from the building structure with stainless steel aircraft cable. This visual piece evokes various life-form communication networks such as neurons, mycelia, or tree roots, relating to many of the academic disciplines studied in the building.
The expansive, branching design consisted of hundreds of segments of rolled tube elements. Locations where hanger cables could connect to the building were limited by ceiling panel access and building utilities located above the ceiling plane. The fabrication team at Ignition Arts developed a construction sequence strategy that would allow for as much shop fabrication as possible while limiting prefabricated assemblies such that they could be transported to site, brought within the fully operational and occupied building, and lifted into place using equipment that would not overload the existing building structure.
All members of the design team collaborated in the Rhino3D model developed by Rob Ley Studio to seamlessly share information throughout the evolving process. With so many components and installation restrictions to accommodate, it was essential to rapidly evaluate changes to the artwork and hanger cable locations. CRAFT performed the structural analysis using Grasshopper analytical plugins so that design changes could be rapidly evaluated, and the impacts of those changes were then clearly communicated to the art and fabrication teams within their familiar 3D model space.
The hanging state of the sculpture was evaluated by locating sufficient hangers to allow for stable site installation with staged assemblies. Two cables minimum were located on the artwork assemblies to which zero other assemblies attached. An artwork assembly connecting to another required one cable minimum. A 1.25ft sphere was projected around the selected hanger locations on the artwork and an evolutionary solver was used to goal seek points along the sculpture within the projected spheres to minimize the distance between the center of mass of the sculpture and the geometric center of the support locations. Sidesway and rotation are mitigated by minimizing the eccentricity between the center of mass and center of support which resulted in a more stable system.
Synapse is in a seismically active region and because of the fully suspended nature of the piece, the cable connections to the building support structure are required to allow for 360° range of motion in the horizontal plane. The artwork mass is also capable of swaying horizontally with the potential to collide with building components in a maximum considered earthquake event. True-to-scale deflections were baked into the Rhino3D art model with building components included to identify collision hazards, reduce the artwork scope where needed, and to understand where minor collisions that would only occur in the most severe earthquake would not cause hazardous damage to the artwork or the building components.
PROJECT TEAM
Artist: Rob Ley Studio, Fabricator: Ignition Arts
