Project Summary Chris Chalmers of Fabripod collaborated with BJ Scherrer of Mandala Domes in July 2025 to produce a set of illuminated sculptural installations for the Cascadia NW Arts & Music Festival in Darrington Washington. The installations took the form of a hanging canopy and a DJ booth backdrop and were installed in the main…
Project Description This is a personal project I did for the addition I built on my house in Boise in 2025. The addition has an in-law apartment and I conceived of this shelf as a space divider between living room and bedroom. The shelf attaches to one wall and a central column for stability. The…
CNC Workholding: My Go-To Methods for Securing Material Workholding is one of the ultimate givens of CNC work: you absolutely must have a secure way to keep your material stationary while machining it. There are as many types and approaches to this as there are fish in the sea, and what works beautifully for one…
#learningmoment I did not expect some of the cuts on this project to blow out so badly. Most of the 3/4” sheets of Baltic birch in this 6 sheet job turned out great but at least 2 had MAJOR delamination and blowout. So what went wrong? When cutting MDF or more coarse plywood, you’re fine…
Project Description A new canopy for a student lounge at the California College of the Arts (CCA) hangs within a double-height space and functions as a light scope, spatial definer, and viewing portal. The minimum surface structure is made up of 546 unique HDPE panels linked to one another by over 4000 pop-rivets. The name…
Students often mistake Artificial Intelligence for a “black box” design generator—a tool where you input a prompt and receive a rendered image of a building. However, for the contemporary architect, the true power of AI lies not in generating the image, but in facilitating the logic. As we move deeper into the decade, the most…
Project Summary Fabripod made its debut in digital design with the Urchin Lamp, a product designed using parametric techniques similar to the Aortic Arc project at California College of the Arts. The Urchin lamps were laser cut from thin (2 veneer) birch plywood or PLA plastic and were available either pre-assembled or as a kit,…
There’s no doubt that parametric design can be a powerful tool in the hands of architects and industrial designers. Its applications vary with design goals and the technical requirements of the project. Below are summaries of typical use cases for parametric design techniques and strategies for implementation. Each strategy includes a few very simple examples,…