William Huff's Parquet Deformations: Two Viennese Experiments
Werner Van Hoeydonck

Proceedings of Bridges 2020: Mathematics, Art, Music, Architecture, Education, Culture
Pages 383–386
Short Papers

Abstract

This paper aims to bring a new nexus of activities around architect and educator William Huff’s work, presented here as an experimental design assignment in architectural education. After his retirement, professor Huff donated a collection of his students’ work to the HfG Archive in Ulm, Germany, which inspired us, at the Institute of Art and Design in Vienna to give a semester assignment focusing on parquet deformations (PD). The open search for strategies to transfer the idea of planar PDs into 3D led to fascinating results. We discovered a field of formal research that broadened the students’ horizons concerning 2 and 3-dimensional relationships enthusing them considerably by making them aware of the unlimited possibilities of spatial transformation. This is a brief report of a fruitful project in basic design education for architects and designers.

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