(POP)culture

This project used 1,581 recycled soda bottles to create a canopy for shading from the sun. The project incorporated 3D modeling and scripting software to generate the desired surface created by the bottom of the soda bottles. The project sought to stimulate creative alternatives for recycling and reusing materials.

Each bottle is filled with a small amount of colored water. The specific color of the water is based on the elevation of the bottle relative to the groundplane. Each bottle is hung from a grid by a unique string length ranging from 6" to 30".

Basic Materials:

1,581 soda bottles
washers
masons line 1000+ yards
hot glue
masking tape
wood 4x4 and 2x6
wood screws
brackets
food coloring
water
outdoor paint
basic tools
many volunteers!!

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Step 1: Digital Fabrication

I used Rhinoceros, a 3D modeling program to create the surface that the bottom of the bottles form. From this form, we used Grasshopper (a scripting program) to generate a dataset containing the length of each string corresponding to a coordinate grid system. For simplicity, we label one direction of the coordinate using numbers, and the second direction using letters. The dataset, in addition to providing the location of the string, provided the color of liquid in each bottle that would hang from each string.