PLAT 1.5 has just been released, and with it my critical essay entitled Algorithmic Abuse, which I’m sharing below. It’s a short attempt to raise awareness towards several gaps in computational architecture’s theory as well as practice.
Please support the journal by purchasing a copy!
Head over to my blog for the complete article.
Project team: Manuel Torres, Dimitrie Stefanescu
Studio Leader: Sang Lee
This is the final studio (Border Conditions) project for msc2. Though quite a lot of parametric techniques went into the making of it, they were subservient to rather than defining the project’s outcome.
Winning entry for DuPont + igloo‘s Changing the Face – Casa Poporului. Idea sparked off with Raresh Dragoiu of drr_____ fame.
Jury was composed of:
prof. arh. Dorin Stefan (DSBA)
arh. Bruno Andresoiu (igloomedia)
Anne-Line Citrene (DuPont France)
Gabi Rottes (DuPont Germany)
Some pictures from the exhibition, which can be seen at the University Underground Passage until the 7th of December (09):
Recently we were allowed the use of computers at one of our one-day-long exams – so my school is finally living up to the attribute change in my about page – it used to be horrible, now it’s damp. A real improvement in life quality.
Here’s the outcome: judge it lightly since the overall design was conceived with a specific public in mind during a brief four hour period, including plotting.
Man, this post is definitively sarcastic. I’m working on improving that 
(as in downplaying the sarcastic note).
The assignment was loosely formulated so as to allow maximum freedom in identifying problems and needs in the Lipscani area and proposing an architectural (built) solution that would tackle the aforementioned points.
My vision concentrated on issues relating to the poor visibility/readability of the overall area (and the necessity of a landmark) and the lack of “free” public urban space. The functional program was mainly derived from the observation that most historic centers (Lipscani being a prime example in this) loose their initial cultural and traditional economic value in favor of the over-dominant bar/cafe. This leads to a certain repetition of fluxes (economic, cultural, pedestrian) which harms the respective area.
Geometry-wise, my proposal respects local aspects of the area, namely its porosity and the way the urban tissue coagulated around narrow winding streets and small interior courtyards in a constantly surprising lattice.
In respect to this approach, i considered the lot as a solid volume on which forces are applied in respect with the openings and general director lines of the site. Performing a “structural” analysis on the site revealed the patterns by which these forces would naturally flow towards given points of rest (namely the designated openings of the courtyards). Using topological optimization techniques these patterns were transformed into geometry which was later subtracted from the original body thus giving the overall shape of the building.
By following this design method I ensure an optimal circulation flow through the built site, encouraging interaction and furthering the development of the local urban tissue in a manner very close to its characteristics (gained by spontaneous evolution) thus fully integrating the new implant.
That’s wrapper of the last month, give or take.
Call them what you will, but there’s been a huge hype about them some time ago.
Grasshopper’s scripting capabilites are now a huge super cool feature, especially if you’re coding in visual studio (c#) and then pasting the shit or making dlls. I did this some time ago when i suddenly realized that you can declare your own static variables inside scripting nodes (and these guys hold up their values during the updating procedure). And the vector math is already there too.
This is an implementation based on Craig Reynolds‘s neurons, and a little bit on Daniel Shiffman’s processing example (which was updated and used some time ago for this.
Now, if somebody will be nice and implement some collision detection…
PS: I will upload the def. soonish (i have to clean it up a bit first). Ok i didn’t clean it up; here’s the link.
Here’s a new 10 day link: http://dl.transfer.ro/boidsT-Transfer_RO-16Nov-ad56f6.zip
Final link, stable and sound: http://improved.ro/Grasshopper/boidsTCAV.zip
I have been (re)invited to teach at the upcoming Parametric Design Workshop that’s going to take place at the HTWK Leipzig.
The line-up includes:
Ioulietta Zindrou, Maite Bravo, Verena Volger, Luis Fraguada (of Barcelona/IAAC fame);
Yours truly Dimitrie (of Bucharest fame);
Henning Rambow, Patrik Bedarf (Leipzig crew);
I haven’t been that productive lately due to the many things happening all the time, but hopefully I’ll be able to get back on the research track in summer.
I’m on the speaker list at the Rule Based Design Symposium at the TU Berlin. Thank you Christophe for the invite!
(27.05.09) The Symposium takes place at 18:00 in the Geodätenstand 6 O.G. TU Berlin Hauptgebäude, Straße des 17. Juni 135, 10623 Berlin.
The Rule Based Design Symposium highlights contemporary academic and practice based research employing CAD, CAM, Coding/Web tools in addressing & communicating architectural design intents & constraints. The research spectrum ranges from theory to the digital crafting of buildings and their components.
Organized by Christophe Barlieb.
Flexibility in thought and expression is vital to all creative fields. The power of a new generation of parametric and bespoke CAD tools lies in the ability to negotiate and communicating the design intent clearly. This streamlining saves time, materials while integrating architecture, engineering and fabrication over the course of the entire architectural design process.
The symposium features research works by young contemporary academics in the fields of mathematics, architecture and fabrication
Schedule:
Time Speaker Affiliation Theme
18:00 Gisela Baurmann TU Berlin RBD Opening Statements
18:05 Kristoffer Josefsson TU Berlin Mathematics in Architecture
18:25 Dimitrie Stefanescu U.Bucharest Scripting Architecture
18:45 Christophe Barlieb TU Berlin Integration of Engineering & Design
19:05 Norbert Palz CITA Rapid Prototyping in Architecture
19:25 Martin Tamke CITA Fabrication of Architecture
19:45 Baurmann, Barlieb, Pfeiffer TU Berlin Discussion with Speakers & Public
20:00 PARTY
More as a scripting experiment, when i was mucking about trying to make the delaunay triangulation work in grasshopper i somehow found the wonderfully complex qhull library which i promptly set to push and pull to get it to work with grasshopper. As advised on their website, the best way to do it is to call it as an external program, which is exactly what i’ve done: no files are written or read, no dos windows pop up, everything’s smooth.
Given that you don’t have many complex operations in grasshopper after the solution is generated, you’ll be able to handle quite an impressive amount of points (say 200 on my three-year old toplap) in real time. If you add the simple planarSrf operation, then say 60-70 and it gets sloppy.
What you’ll need to do to get things rolling:
0. Download the 3dvqhull definition and example file, and remember not to use it for commercial purposes, share-alike whatever you do with it and take the time to give the proper credits: 
1. Download qhull, and unzip it in a folder of your choice.
2. Get going and search for “System.dll”. What you’re interested in is the 2.0 version which you’ll usually find in here: “C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.5[...]\”. If you can’t find it, I’m amazed grasshopper works for you. Anyway, you can find and install it from here.
3. Add the newly found System.dll version 2.o as a referenced assembly of the qhull component in the definition file.
If it turns orange, it’s cool.
4. Write in the panel that is linked to the “path” input the full path to the qhull program qvoronoi. You don’t need to add the .exe extension, but you can do it if you feel confortable.
5. There’s just one more thing you should know: facets that contain the infinite vertex are omitted altogether, without remorse. So as to have as little facets tending towards infinitum, I always add the corners of the points bounding box to the input sites.
You can scale the bounding box in respect with its center, or you can just call the whole thing off – it’s your choice.
I think this just about covers everything. Take care and have fun.
PS: Qhull does more than voronoi. So if you have the time to explore and test, please do – the package is very powerfull and it can be used for more than this.
Who’s interested can just grab a pdf file of the whole 91 page keynote here (quite a large file).
I talked about some projects I did (some together with Veronica Popescu) over the last two years, always insisting on the computational approach and detailing the techniques used.
I presented scripting approaches and more interactive (parametric) grasshopper based modeling. Some Processing based approaches were presented and I insisted on the necessity of using multiple open tools that can be made to communicate between one another.
I tried to clearly mark out the relationship between fabrication and the overall design – how material properties and building techniques inform the design and viceversa.
Reactions were good, and it seems computational approaches are definetively stirring people up.
Thanks are required to Patrick Bedarf, who made this possible and is proving to be an excellent host in Leipzig, and also to prof. Henning Rambow for all the support.
Also if you are reading this from Leipzig and are interested in joining us tommorow at 16.oo @ HTWK computer pool for some hands-on grasshopper work, there’s no one stopping you.
This is just a prototype for our current school assignement involving collective housing (~80+ apartments + commercial and community spaces).
We are using the excellent space-partitioning properties of the Voronoi algorithm to create a lattice of interior and exterior courtyards that progressively make a transition from public space to semi-public, semi-private, and, in the end private space. This way we propose the creation of a coherent urban lattice encouraging interaction with the busy city outside while in the same time offering various degrees of protection/”cosiness”. We are not proposing a new type of urban tissue in itself, but merely adapting and reinterpreting some qualities of sponaneous developement and local tradition(“fundatura”) in a flexible (yet highly accurate) digital framework.
As I was saying at the begging of the post, this is just a technical showdown – everything you see rendered above is far from what the end product will probably be (since also the way the assignement was formulated forms that evade from some general bar-variation are quite difficult to fit in the judging criteria). Yet it indeed demonstrates the versatility of parametric/generative architecture and the capabilities of the digital framework proposed to control and manipulate with accuracy all aspects of the project (from raw geometry and algorithm to technical: floor height, floor areas, built/unbuilt ratio, sun exposure and so on – the possibility to expand the definition to apartment level details is definitively there).
That above graphic is a watered down version of the grasshopper definition (I will not release it under any license for now).
Here’s the latest school project, finished some time ago in early January. After pondering wether to reveal it or not (not that proud of it), I decided for the former in the end…
For those who really like to play with voronoi regions and stuff, here’s the final grasshopper definition file (right click, save target as – else you’ll get a ~250kb of useless xml in your browser window).
The vcell component outputs now individual cells as closed polylines and closed nurbs curves. This is useful if you are using this for some urban project like i am i would have liked to, mostly due to easy offsetting and area calculation possiblities – included in the definition file – or height extrusion – included as well. You can even go further and color (using shaders) each cell coresponding with its mass/area/height etc.
Unless otherwise specified, this work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Licence.
