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Francis Bitonti, principal of FADarchitecture and fellow Professor a the Pratt Institute School of Architecture has taken the time to share his entry for the City Racks Design Competition. It operates like a lurking vine-work of containment to the point where they seem to almost consume the bicycles in a luscious flesh. 

It began with the City Racks Design Competition. The New York City Department of Transportation and the Cooper-Hewitt  National Design  Museum, along with Google, wanted to encourage cycling as a convenient method of transportation. After a study revealed that lack of access to secure bike parking was the main deterrent, the two organizations created a contest to develop an innovative bike rack that would raise the profile of cycling in the city. Francis Bitonti, principal with FADarchitecture, jumped at the opportunity to participate.

“A lot of what I do comes out of writing small computer programs that generate forms,” he said. “This form is disconnected but continuous at the same time, operating as a modular system that produces many variations. It is about finding beauty in the unfamiliar.” Bitonti designed the rack using animation software “to develop the forms and create an aesthetic sensibility for the project,” he said. He then transferred his work to software typically used for scientific computing to produce complex patterns that would be very time-consuming and difficult to produce any other way.

The two full scale prototypes were constructed using FDM 3d printing technology by RedEye ARC. The complexity was no problem for RedEye. “RedEye is used to creating unusual shapes and forms,” said Ryan Sybrant, RedEye Architectural Development Manager. “We extracted data from Frank’s CAD file, which directed one of our 100 fused deposition modeling (FDM) systems to put down layers of material, similar to the way an ink jet printer puts down ink.

Bitonti redesigned the rack many times along the way to reduce the number of modular connections, making it easier for bikers to use. Even so, by altering the rotation, position and number of units, one can produce 63 drastically different variations of the design. Bitonti believes the design of his new rack will enable a maximum number of bikes to be stored in limited sidewalk space, keeping the sidewalk more open for pedestrians. Two prototypes of the bike rack were created. One is actually in use on the streets of New York. The other was temporarily on display at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

text and images provided by FADarchitecture

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