Building Community

UNC Asheville STEAM Studio faculty, staff and students construct a geodesic dome for Asheville Art Museum

By UNC Asheville

July 7^th, 2023

In the STEAM Studio, UNC Asheville’s innovation and fabrication center, makers, engineers and artists join with faculty and staff for creative and cross-disciplinary projects — including some that support local organizations and community needs.

This year, the STEAM Studio built a series of models for the Asheville Art Museum to accompany an exhibition of design prints by architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. The collaborative project involved students, faculty, staff, and community members and took Fuller’s ideas from the museum’s walls to the streets of Asheville.

The project began in summer 2022 when Whitney Richardson, curator of the Asheville Art Museum, contacted Sara Sanders, director of UNC Asheville’s STEAM Studio, for help fabricating small-scale models of Fuller’s geodesic and Fly’s Eye domes. Fuller believed the geometric structures, built using interlocking triangles and circular openings, might offer an affordable and sustainable housing option.

Sanders first turned to the Creative Fabrication class. Each semester, students in the class work with a local stakeholder to solve a challenge using the resources in the STEAM Studio. Past projects have included assistive devices for residents of a local retirement community and public art prototypes for a new greenway in Asheville. The class is popular among engineering students but is open to any major.

“One of the fundamental ideas with the class is that students get the experience of working with a client or a stakeholder,” Sanders says. “They’re not designing for themselves. They’re taking feedback and learning how to make changes based on that feedback. That iteration is a very important aspect of being a designer.”

Last fall, engineering students Nate Blachly and Maxwell Turcios-Lara created a 3D model of the Fly’s Eye dome. Then, using a 3D printer, they produced the six unique shapes that make up the dome and constructed a 2-foot-diameter prototype. Meanwhile, psychology student Lauren Steiner partnered with engineering student Ivan Renjel Nomura to 3D model and prototype the geodesic dome.

A community effort

While the Fly’s Eye prototype worked for the exhibition, Richardson wanted to display a larger, 7-foot-diameter model of the geodesic dome. For that, Sanders turned to the STEAM Studio’s SkillSet community outreach program, which offers after-school classes, summer camps and workshops for local school children. SkillSet particularly focuses on under-resourced communities, and female-identified and gender-expansive students to help bridge the gender gap in STEAM fields and trades.

In the spring 2023 after-school class Making for the Museum, taught by STEAM studio technician Leslie Rosenberg, SkillSet students started by exploring the strength of triangles and discussed the challenges of designing for a client.

“We used toothpicks and dot candies to experiment with building using shapes,” says Animae PerryGriffin, a rising senior at Buncombe County Schools Virtual Academy. “At first, I built a little house using square and rectangular shapes, and I was shocked to find that it broke immediately when something heavy was placed on it. On the other hand, it was much stronger when we built using repeating triangle shapes.”

Then, working with students from the local Hood Huggers International’s Under Instruction youth program, the SkillSet students fabricated the larger model of the geodesic dome for the Asheville Art Museum.

“For the after-school kids, having a piece made and put into a museum is special and exciting,” Rosenberg says. “It’s a lifetime achievement for some people. That and designing for a community and designing for a client was a special experience.”

Design in context

Creative Fabrication students also used the geodesic dome design to prototype a series of public artworks that double as information gathering and dissemination hubs in the nearby Burton Street neighborhood.

“They designed panels — some permanent, some interchangeable, some interactive — where people could write or post things,” Sanders says. “[The idea was for it] to serve both purposes, to satisfy the needs of the art museum and the Burton Street neighborhood.”

While both the Creative Fabrication and SkillSet classes were tasked with creating a tangible product, they were equally focused on the broader context of the object they produced. Students studied Fuller’s designs and philosophies, as well as the history and needs of the Burton Street neighborhood.

“We look at the history and the greater context for the issue that the clients are experiencing,” Sanders says. “What does it mean to build public art in this neighborhood that used to be a historically Black neighborhood? How can we engage that history? We also looked at Buckminster Fuller and how he tried to make housing more affordable and efficient — an issue in this area of Asheville.

“So, students were able to think about Buckminster Fuller’s work and apply that to the issues happening in the Burton Street neighborhood.”

The exhibition, Altruistic Genius: Buckminster Fuller’s Plans to Save the Planet, opened in April and runs through August 21.

Footnotes

Story by Kim Catley

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