My thesis is investigation architectural and landscape methods to articulate a new orientation of Europe that emphasizes the connection between the historically polarized East and West.

To emphasize this orientation I am using the watershed as a supra-nationstate entity to negotiate differences through the tangible geographic interface of water. By using the a GIS topography map from the EEA (http://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/data/digital-elevation-model-of-europe). In GIS I converted the colored elevation map to greyscale.

In Illustrator and Photoshop I finally made a grayscale map in which emphasis is put on the two watersheds by highlighting their elevation in relation a planar representation of Europe’s contours.

Then I imported the image into Rhino using the “heightfield” command. I tested the operation several times with different contrasts in the greyscales to get the proportion between the elevations and the european contours right. Then I continued to add faces to the sides with the “duplicate edges tool”, “lofting” this line with a square, then “join” the faces to create a solid, “boolean differences out of a larger “box” to create the positive as well as the negative form. Finally it was exported to a .STL file to sent to the fab machines.

MILLING

Well milling was pretty straight forward. I opened the .stl file as seen in the image above in Partworks3d and made a rough cut-file and and a smooth one. What wasn’t fantastic is that it took 8 hours of milling. I used screws and doubled sidded tape to mount the foam to the shopbot table.

After 8h of milling i painted the foam with a primer and rubbed the edges with vaseline. I also sprayed in some mold release.

I took 5 buckets of hydro-cement (a mixture of plaster and cement ) to fill the cast. I let it dry overnight and the next day it has hardened.

I was able to release the mold without the destroying it (the heat of the cement reaction did not melt the cast as mentioned on various weblogs). Yet , the vaseline which was advised on many weblogs caused ugly blotches on my model. I had to spray paint it to make it look nice again. The final results, turned out pretty nice -  see picture below.