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.
Intro
The project started out as an ambitious student-powered endeavor to design and fabricate at a 1:1 scale the flagship pavilion for the ZA11 Speaking Architecture event in Cluj, Romania. While at the same time integrating into its historically-charged context, the design (which was elaborated to a concept stage during a week-long workshop) boasts a strong representational power which was much needed in order to fulfill its main goal: attracting passers-by to the event. At the same time, the object, through its tectonic characteristics, tries to make legible the new ontology which is slowly defined by computational architecture and thus becomes a showcase for the design processes empowered by digital tools.
Some social philosophical aftershocks in architecture. Collaboration with Veronica Popescu.
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.
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.
Latest school project:
(board 1)
(board 2)
(board 3)
{input}
The project required us to design an archeological center consisting of one conference room (75 seats), three workshop spaces and a bar/buffet [+ reception and service spaces]. Adjacent we will have to design a small hotel/pension, so our projects will have to be able to scale up formally (and function-wise).
{output}
My project is based on the act of cutting open the ground and inviting people and light inside pays tribute to a defining part of archeology “per se”: excavating sites in order to recover cultural remains and other artifacts in order to better understand mankind.
The overall form of the building emerges in a subtle way from the surrounding landscape, inviting its discovery in a less violent manner. Not choosing to mark its presence in a classical/standard way was a decision taken so as to echo the fact that archeology has the task of surveying areas in order to find new sites – information is never out in the open and its artefacts are hidden – at the same time not disrupting the surrounding beautifully curved landscape.
The space inside curves gently around three interior courtyards, following the natural terrain. Luminaries assist the inerior courtyards both formally (composition-wise) and functionally (in providing natural sunlight).
{model}
3D Print and cardboard:
——
3d printing done on a nice ZCorp 510 at Spot Desing – thanks for the flexible payment option and patience!
Boards printed at duostudio (Y!: studio.plot) inside the English passage – thanks for the longlasting quality, 15% early bird price cut and friendly staff 
Also thanks to our assistant teacher (andra panait) which happily provided help and counseling during her private (spare) time.
Back in school, Veronica and me hosted a big tryout of the waffle code advertised earlier (which is now used in Chile, San Fransisco and Bucharest – sorry i couldn’t help boasting).
The assembly of roughly 486 ribs into an alien-looking 1/500 terrain model generated quite a nice social event…
We still owe the laser cutter guys some obscene amount of money, but we hope to repay our studio’s debt asap.
I had some fun some time ago with plexiglass, a laser printer, rhino, and a very limited and buggy script that made “ribs” out of a surface.
The results were nice, so I decided to share:
Here’s the bugged up script (it’s quite useless, but people may find inspiration where I didn’t):
Option Explicit
‘
Things evolve:
Veronica and me (Dimitrie). This could have looked better, but alas, we had to make a 1m x 1.3m model in the same time.
That would summarize my last project at the design studio. Our theme consisted of creating a “perfume museum” at a site located in the vicinity of the Mogosoaia Palace. (I found it to be a very difficult site – history, tradition, nature etc. how to properly integrate a building in such a rich and precise context is a question that remains open.)
The project’s challenge was to transpose the notion of perfume in an architectural form. Wikipedia suggests many trails. Chevalier’s Dictionary of Symbols suggests some more. Balzac: “Tout parfum est une combinaison d’air et de lumiere.”; Hugo: “Le parfum est de la lumiere.”. Floral motifs, blobitecture, incense and religion, drugs – it was up to you to decide on how to visually speculate perfume.
I was fed up of the meanings and interpretations of perfume. Perfume nowadays is synthetic. Leave me be. Smell chemistry. You can’t contradict that.
I broke the visual representations of the chemical components of a standard perfume (chemical representations have very strict geometric rules – 120 deg angles, pentagons and hexagons) and got voronoi regions.
Ahhh, sweet metaphor of computational architecture. Isn’t it beautiful? Elegant? Yet it has nothing to do with architecture. Form is detached from function and we are approaching a similar crisis of that of modernism, when the exact opposite happened. People don’t find themselves included in such designs. Computation that strictly refers to form/ellegance alienates architecture from its goals. I don’t trust the starchitect theory as being the solution; it won’t last or it will split us into sculptors and engineers.
(Please do read that article. It’s a must. It shows past (as in blobitecture and zaha), present(not the “so last year” deconstructivism or – worse even – post-modernism) and pushes through to the question posed by the future.)
Enough theoretical blabber. I’m giving all this computational business some thought. Code in architecture is nice, as long as it serves the people, not just ellegance. (Please do notice I didn’t use the term “function”. I prefer the much more accurate and revelatory word “people” = complex emergent system.)
Here are some pics of the model:
Programmed in Rhino. Finished in Sketchup. Model made in ManualManufacturyCAD(hand glued). Laser cutting here.
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