Tower Project
First Year
Oof. Here we go again. Sorry for the wait.
This next project has 2 parts: a study part (intended to teach us the importance of study models) and the final product. The initial prompt given to us for the first part was to design and construct a tower capable of supporting the size and weight of a cue ball six inches off the ground. And it has to be made out of spaghetti 
. This one was a fun project. I’ve built many popsicle stick and toothpick bridges in my day so I was excited. Used to the triangle and trusses I utilized so often in my bridge models, I immediately defaulted to those. Many others went straight for blocky towers causing them to be incredibly unstable and often shatter under the weight of the cue ball. I was unsure of my design at first but I soon realized that I greatly overestimated the weight of a cue ball . When competed my design could easily support much more than the weight of a single cue ball.
Unfortunately this is the only picture of it that I still have. It was designed in a plus shape from above and gently tapered in toward the top where I build a little basket to hold the cue ball. Upon realizing how strong it truly was, we were gonna test it with a bunch of concrete pieces around studio. However, it got knocked to the floor a few times by stray elbows and broke .
Once completing that first stage of the project we moved on to the real test: design and construct a tower capable of supporting the size and weight of a cue ball 3 feet off the ground. However, this time we were to use bass wood. In addition, it had to have a “skin” of a different material, a base, and a graphic representing it. I ended up sticking with a similar design to my spaghetti model except scaled up to 3 feet tall. The tower itself had 3 sections: the base, the body, and the head/basket. The skin was a thin plastic sheet I bought that I attached the sides, about a quarter inch off the main structure, emphasizing the “plus shape.” The base of the tower was a wooden cylinder with the top face cut at an angle. The tower attached to it with dowels along its base that inserted into the wooden base. Because of the angle cut into the wooden base’s top face some of the dowels were more exposed than others, giving it the look of a pier emerging from the water with a wave passing by (which was my inspiration for it).
I ended up building a few study models of each section out of my spaghetti (I still have some left over, I keep it just in case I need it for whatever reason ) to test out size and proportions. After I was satisfied I moved on to building the actual model. I think it was during this project that I realized my love and apparent talent for model making. I think it was a combination of my previous experience building various stick models and my perfectionist approach that really helped my models come out so well. The hardest part of this was definitely getting all the angles and lengths correct. Most were pretty straight forward, but the diagonal pieces were legit trial and error. I would cut out a bunch until one fit perfectly and then do my best to imitate that piece for the rest. Eventually, after a few weeks, working my way up one section at a time, it was completed.
Overall I feel alright about it. It isn’t my favorite project but still turned out pretty cool in my opinion. Now all that was left was the graphic representing our tower. This was left pretty open for what we wanted to do. Originally I wanted to create an artistic piece showing my towers unrelenting epicness. However, I soon realized that my lack of photoshop skills would prevent this from happening. After exploring a few different options I eventually decided to create a digital technical drawing that showed the structure of the tower. I wanted the graphic to show the side and top views of each section, with the side views having cutaways to show the structure of the tower beneath the skin. It took quite some time, mostly because I had no experience using Adobe Illustrator before this. I mostly self taught myself the program with my brother helping my a little bit when I came home for the weekend.
I ended up being pretty proud of the graphic. This was the first digital graphic I had every made so it was a new experience for me. It also gave me the opportunity to learn a new program. Illustrator has ended up becoming my favorite program to create these kinds of graphics with.
This was a pretty cool project, especially since it was my first taste of an individual architecture project in college. Many of the other kids in my studio chose a more artistic route, creating more artistic towers than my structural tower (realizing that bass wood didn’t need much structure to support a cue ball ). The others were all pretty dope for the most part. It was pretty interesting to see how different people interpret the same prompt like this. However I think that the sheer density of my structure coupled with its craftsmanship helped it stand out among the crowd. I actually still have it. Its sitting on the “architecture model table” behind me and my spaghetti study models are sitting next to me at my desk.
I still have a few free days before classes start back up for me and the next 2 projects are pretty short so I’ll try and get those up soon. Thanks for reading! 
@Honey8
@anna834
tho i don’t have much building skills and practice like you and 
I really loved the end result of the project and lol i can see how much hard you worked to nail metal moped pieces onto a sheet of wood 
And one more thing i liked was that image which displays different parts of the bike like an index. It seems pretty cool. I heard somewhere you draw really bad i think that was real or i mis read it lol !
