Bike Rack
This was a three week long project in which I was required to create a bike rack for the The Ohio State University campus at 1/6 scale. I was not allowed to use any machinery save for hand tools to test my craft skills.
It started with scoping out a location. I decided to choose this bike rack that was nestled in a courtyard. I had lived in this courtyard for two years and walked by it almost every day and never even realized it was there. I thought it'd be perfect to imagine a new bike rack that wouldn't blend into the environment.
I measured out the lot of space I'd be using as the base for my bike rack along with doing some small analysis on the surroundings. I was asked to then incorporate the elements I saw into the design of the bike rack through some quick sketches. I was most intrigued by the perpendicular planes and dissecting lines. I liked the way it seemed like the buildings were all melting into one another.
I especially liked the way number 20 looked, so I took the sketch and ideated on its form.
Eventually I settled back on my original idea, though I definitely fleshed it out. If this were to be a bike rack, it'd need places for someone to lock their bike securely to the rack. So I added holes for lock chains. I also wanted there to be diversity in the way someone could place their bike. So I changed up the layout of the rack. It was also important to make sure all the measurements were correct, so the height of the pillars were based on the most common bike measurements I could find.
I was still having difficulty conceptualizing the actual measurement and size of the bike rack so I made a life model.
Once I took it outside and compared it to an actual bike, I felt confident to take all my measurements down to 1/6 scale. The only materials I used were chip board, cardboard, and glue.
I was very stressed about the measurements so I made sure to make a pattern out of paper for everything before I started cutting into my actual materials. Each section was made of a few layers of cardboard and then glued together to create the basic body. I then cut out kraft paper to the exact shape of the surface area of the rack. Once I glued the paper onto the body, it looked near seamless as I was instructed. Since this was supposed to be a metal bike rack, I made sure to paint all of my racks with some silver paint before gluing them down, evenly spaced, onto the chipboard lot.
While this was a brief project, it was enjoyable to create a scale model of our design. I am happy with the way each piece came out, but if I were to do this again I think I might try to either use a different material or make my cuts as precise as possible. There were some cuts that came out smaller than they should have been, and my pattern was accurate so I can only chock it up to user error. I think I might also shift the bike racks so that every other is higher/lower than the previous, like a zig zag. My goal was to create a bike rack that stood out, and while I'm sure that the form itself might turn some heads, the symmetrical and even line they create is not doing me any favors. Perhaps even giving it a more eye catching color would have helped my original goal.
