Art and engineering entwined in outdoor exhibit
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Steve Preston shown
here with his "Portals" exhibition on Engineering Mall.
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larger image) |
 n August 2004, just two days before he would leave
Madison to pursue his dream—a master’s degree in architecture—student
Steve Preston learned he had cancer.Not only
did his Hodgkin’s lymphoma reroute his educational path, it also
changed how Preston approaches each day. “I would go to bed at
night and I would just cling to the hope that I’d wake up the
next morning,” he says. “It was that bad. You don’t
realize how precious life is, or how much you really need to get done,
until you’re actually staring down that path.”
Preston views that path—his memories, his experiences
and his future—as a series of portals. “Joining all of those
portals, you can create a new place to go to, and conversely, you have
a place where you’ve been,” says Preston, who began cancer
treatments at UW Hospital and enrolled here as a master’s student.
In May, Preston brought his portals to life in a
series of massive paper-tube arches for his exhibit, “Portals
to an Architecture,” on Engineering Mall. “You have to do
what makes you happy,” he says. “Something that I’ve
always wanted to do is make a sculpture, and have it be visible, and
have it mean something.”
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Steve Preston hoped
the complex engineering behind his sculpture was invisible to
those who visited it.
(View
larger image) |
“Portals” featured 11 entwined paper-tube
arches—some of which weigh more than 400 pounds— in varying
sizes and lengths. Each shape, length and tube size was significant,
says Preston. “I took the shape of each arch from a CT head-scan
I had done when I was sick,” he says.
Nine freshman enrolled in an introduction to engineering
design course collaborated with Preston to plan, prepare and install
the paper-tube exhibit.
Highly engineered structural products, paper tubes
are used in the printing industry and as forms for concrete columns,
among other applications. (Preston’s advisor, Professor
Larry Bank, has studied paper tubes for several years. In his latest
project, funded via the UW-Madison
Industrial & Economic Development Research Program, he will
study using paper tubes for bridge deck forms.
Obvious in its visual appeal, “Portals”
was very much an engineering project, says Preston, whose educational
emphasis is in structural engineering. Most notably, because donor Sonoco
Products Company manufactures the paper tubes straight, Preston exploited
the materials’ undesirable tendency to creep—to sag, stretch,
or in this case, bend.
He and the freshmen engineering students built pedestal-style
supports that provided an environment for the tubes to bend slowly into
shape under their own weight. They built a finite-element model of the
arches and subjected them to load combinations specified in the American
Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) specification
for luminaires and sign supports. “We felt that the ‘Portals’
structure most resembled a highway sign support structure,” explains
Bank.
Preston designed the structure to withstand wind
gusts up to 90 mph according to AASHTO code. He developed a design basis
for it, using the allowable stress design philosophy; those allowables
were based on published test data for similar paper tubes used in building
projects by Japanese architect Shigeru Ban, as well as data from Sonoco.
In a different setting, the arches might be covered
with canvas to provide emergency shelter; in an early stage of the project,
Preston investigated methods to create temporary housing and emergency
shelters like those by Ban, whose work inspired Preston’s use
of paper tubes.
“Paper tubes are produced everywhere in the
world—generally from recycled paper—and can be used more
extensively for emergency shelter and housing, provided appropriate
structural forms are designed and methods of rapid deployment are developed,”
says Bank. “The ‘Portals’ project was one realization
of a structural form that is highly suited to paper tubes. Methods to
deploy such a structure in a few hours are needed. The ‘Portals’
project is a first step in developing these methodologies and ideas.”
Preston chose his building materials based on their
sustainability and, to some degree, availability worldwide. As a result,
the structure was engineered to last but also to have a minimal effect
on the environment. After the exhibition, he returned all of the materials—the
paper tubes, the high-density polyethylene culvert “sleeves”
that protected the tubes in the ground, and the fiber-reinforced polymer
bolts used at arch connections—to be recycled.
His goal was for the complex engineering behind his
exhibit to remain invisible. Rather, Preston wanted visitors to touch
it, walk through it and appreciate it as art. “If it was so sublime
that we could get the viewers to forget all of the technology and details,
that we did so much research and structural engineering behind the scenes,
our goal will have been met,” he says.
His cancer now is in full remission. This summer,
he will defend his master’s thesis about the “Portals”
project. And in fall, Preston will pass though yet another portal, as
he begins master’s work in architecture at the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology.
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