Author: Emily Kloostra | Major: Architecture | Semester: Fall 2024

I am Emily Kloostra, a fifth-year architecture student. My research focuses on the intersection between traditional clay making and ceramic 3D printing. I aim to understand how these two forms of making can be combined with each other at the size of handheld objects. Working through issues in this combination at the smaller scale will hopefully allow for future investigation of the pairing of handcraft and 3D printing with larger scale objects, like buildings.

Emily sits next to her partnership’s large 3D print. In the background is instructor James Clarke-Hicks and the printer used in the workshop

Recently, I spent three days in Calgary, Alberta, Canada for a workshop titled “Digital Deformation”. This workshop, run by the ACADIA conference and taught by Isabel Ochoa and James Clarke-Hicks, was about ceramic 3D printing. I was excited to have the opportunity to learn from Isabel and James as well as work on the 3D printer at the University of Calgary’s School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape.

This workshop has added another tool to my tool belt – while I have been working with clay for over half of my life, my 3D printing skills were only at a preliminary level. In Calgary, I and my fellow workshop attendees jumped straight into creating. Isabel and James taught us how to create our own code for the printer, allowing for greater customization in the end result. We learned about the types of clay and how to prep them to print. By the end of day 1, we each had printed a roughly foot tall cylinder of clay, all with different textures and designs.

I think the biggest thing this workshop did was improve my programming skills. We learned how to map images onto surfaces to create texture and how to use physics simulators to make our clay look like draped fabric. On day two, we took the skills from our individual day one prints to team up and create nearly two-foot-tall objects. The printer at the school was the biggest one I have ever seen. It was amazing to be able to design and print at such a large scale.

I also really appreciated the conversations I had over the three days. I spoke with University of Calgary students, professors from multiple universities, and members of the research and development team at Foster + Partners (a large firm based in London). It was so neat to learn about the ways everyone is looking at ceramic printing. My partner, a professor at the University of Oregon, researches plant growth on building facades. She is trying to use 3D printed structures to support and maintain the plants with minimal upkeep necessary. Working with her showed me that ceramic printing has a lot more possibilities than some tiles on a building or a large-scale print.

Overall, this was just such a positive experience. The workshops were full of people who were excited to learn and connect. I am so thankful that I was able to experience this as an undergraduate.

These programming tools and printer workflows should prove useful next semester as I begin producing physical objects for my capstone. This next part is going to be both challenging and fun – I love that I get to do research through making. It will be interesting to see how I can incorporate long-standing craft traditions into such a technical, constantly evolving system.