Latin American design firm BarriosEscudero sees every project as an opportunity to combine technology, materials, and fabrication techniques to create structures that prevent wastefulness during construction. To do so, they avoid cookie-cutter solutions and seek out personalized responses to every challenge they face. Interested in seeing what the office has created using this design philosophy? If you’ve visited the Vectorworks 2016 webpage and explored our Subdivision Surfaces feature, you might have already seen one of their projects: the Pabellón Ricchezze.
Commissioned as part of the International Furniture Fair of Argentina (FIMAR) Exposition, the Pabellón Ricchezze, or Ricchezze Pavilion, takes inspiration from the flow of ergonomic furniture design. The husband and wife design team at BarriosEscudero set out to represent the organic movement of wood grain through a sculpted piece, and the resulting pavilion creates a differentiated space that provides privacy and comfort on a bustling show floor while simultaneously promoting the power of medium-density fiberboard (MDF) as an interior design material.
“The Ricchezze Pavilion creates a space that combines art and function in an uncommon way,” says Luis Ruiz, architectural industry specialist at Vectorworks. “It isn’t something that you see everyday, which is why it really spoke to our team when we sought inspirational projects to model that could demonstrate the new features in our latest design software release, Vectorworks 2016.”
BarriosEscudero created the pavilion by modulating standard-sized pieces of MDF using an industrial-grade, 5-axis CNC router. By constructing it in this way, none of the MDF material was wasted as each side of the pavilion is one-half of the overall fiberboard, creating undulating waves of complementary curves.
“We used to combine a number of digital applications to bring our ideas to life, especially for intricate designs like the Pabellón Ricchezze that require CNC equipment,” Barrios says. “However, now that we have Vectorworks software, we’re discovering that all the tools and functions we need to execute on an idea actually exist within one, integrated environment.”
With their upgraded design solution, the team at BarriosEscudero is working more efficiently and comprehensively toward fulfilling their design mission: imagining unconventional, economical solutions and transforming them into reality, creating structures that are as beautiful to look at as they are to experience.
