14 DAY TRIAL // Perspective is a wonderful thing, and nothing provides perspective like experiencing for yourself the reality of that which you are trying to gain a perspective on.
Some things can't be experienced though, at least not in a timely or satisfactory fashion. Fortunately, there are ways to make up for that.
And if you happen to be an architect or construction worker in need of knowing the layout of the San Francisco sewer system, then this is your lucky day. Or night, as the case may be.
Behold the “Water Works” project. Created by artist Scott Kildall, the system of sticks, which looks kind of like the disaster of all nets, is actually a reproduction of the San Francisco sewer system.
Kildall used a data sheet from the Department of Public Works (DPW), which contained the manholes (nodes) and the pipes that connect them, among other things.
Then he used an Objet500 3D printer to print the physical representation at the Pier 9 facility.
He had to clean the data sheet a fair bit first, of course, then he generated two CSV files with the node and the pipe data, which had to be imported to the open source toolkit known as OpenFrameworks.
That done, he was able to generate the 3D rendering of the SF sewers, complete with the city's terrain reflected on the model.
Then he just did a few trial runs before producing the object in the attached photos. Groovy, no?
