Building Micro Fallingwater

A project by Karl Böhringer and Ken Goldberg.

We have built a microscopic model of Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater using a silicon micromachining process that has been developed to create a variety of Micro Electro Mechanical Structures (MEMS).

The Fabrication Process: The design of these tiny structures has to obey strict rules. It is drawn on a computer aided design (CAD) system, referring to copies of the blueprints from Frank Lloyd Wright. The CAD design is then automatically decomposed into a sequence of rectangles, which allows the generation of patterns on lithography masks. Once the lithography masks are finished, the micro Fallingwater structures are fabricated on a silicon wafer in a sequence of lithography, deposition, and etching steps.


More about design rules for building Micro Fallingwater.

Back to the Invisible Cantilever.

We thank Bruce Donald and Noel MacDonald for their creative advice and support. Thanks also to staff and students at the Cornell Nanofabrication Facility.


© 1996 Karl Böhringer · karl@cs.cornell.edu