De-Laminas

As architectural designs increasingly embrace complex, curved forms, traditional wood construction methods often fall short. This project explores building 3D spatial structures out of graded timber laminas — thin strips of wood that are laminated, bent, and combined into tree-like, branching assemblies.

The core challenge was generating true 3D curvature from a fundamentally flat, bendable material. We solved this by splitting the process into two stages of planar bending, and I worked on the lamination strategy itself — combining different wood types (oak, maple, pine) by their bending properties, then laminating, slicing, and re-soaking strips for a second bend. I programmed toolpaths in Rhino/Grasshopper → RAPID to drive 6-axis robotic milling of the custom timber connectors and 3D-printed bases that hold the branching lamina assemblies together.

Early in the design process, I used Stable Diffusion with ControlNet — feeding it computer-vision edge maps of our forms — to quickly explore material finishes and spatial effects for the structure before committing to a fabrication path. We validated the approach with a full-scale fabricated prototype.