Jacob Stanley Lambert

This project started in many cases from an unresolved or unrealised idea stemming back years. I wanted to use the principles of 3D printing but do it differently. This process started with stable layering materials like paper, cardboard, foam board and polystyrene but I wanted to push the process further and see if you could create a 3D-printed object from a hole in the ground and let the earth act as the mould. So, I started as you might imagine, digging a hole in the ground where I found something which would change the project entirely. A Roman coin.

The coin brought me down the road of research into Roman Britain and the ancient world and material innovation. The discovery brought context to the project in another way. I was digging the hole in a town called Harlow. Harlow is a new town constructed in post-war Britain with futuristic utopian ideals sold as a product. Modern Harlow in many ways mirrors Modern Britain, a dilapidated husk of an idea, underfunded and poorly expanded., littered with ill-judged new builds and shopping complexes.

Now that I had context, modern and ancient Britain I had the tools in order to create the form. I decided to merge the ancient and the modern into a vertical ascendency. The process itself was fraught with trial and error. Roman Concrete was used to create the form, the secrets of which had only been recently discovered. The process itself created a stratified Neo-Roman hybrid object made from and of and in its place.

This process is the culmination of several years of projects in and out of education. The merging of the ancient and the modern is a trope I continually gravitate towards; the ideas of technology being reversed and deconstructed is the area I will be moving forward with post-masters.

Manual High Tech

This project came from a brief whereby students were encouraged to interrogate production lines and fabrication processes in order to identify an area where the idea of the imperfect in an object, an environment, or an experience could be introduced.

I was immediately drawn to high-tech methods of creation, specifically 3D printing, and 3D scanning. During my 3D Design and Craft degree, I worked on a series of projects including rotations in Wood, Metal, Polymers, Digital, and Ceramics. In the final year of my degree, I embarked upon a digital project which opened my eyes to the limitless possibilities of computational design alongside robotic fabrication.

3D printing alongside 3D scanning are the modern tools for modern practitioners. I wanted to use the tenets of these typologies but in order to infuse these often stale, results-driven tools with an identity of authorship I wanted to go back.

This process of manual scanning came from these initial ideas, the creation of the project came from a dedication to the handmade. The tree from which the branches that were used had fallen down after being struck by lightning, so the branches were sawn, and transported to the university where they were assembled without power tools into rudimentary furniture. The chair was then punctuated with welding anchor points for the cable to run through, the steel cable was then welded together. The chair was then brought to a fire and burnt which exemplifies the former shape, the imperfections of the scan are forgotten, and the wooden legs are but a memory.

The project reflects on history, craftsmanship, adhocism, memory, technology, and rich materiality wedded to archaic and primitive forces.