Parametric_bench

This is our first assignment for the CAD/CAM course. 

My idea is to create a bench relied on spline profiles and by changing the profiles position or form to produce variations of the original form_the exciting thing nevertheless is the control over the form and moreover the fact that this file can be sent straight to the manufacturer and have your bench ready by next week, no matter what the form_

The software we are using is Digital Projects, basically Gehry Technology's interpretation of  Catia for architects. 

original form and a possible variation

New Lab (?)

As unfortunately the MDesS people are not supported by a working space we figured out we could look for more radical solutions! The program director seems interested_

1st Day

I have the best impressions so far, we had the international student orientation today.

2 Greeks in the postgraduate courses of GSD this year. Lots of Korean.

MIT Building Technology Lectures

building technology lecture series
MONDAYS 12:30-2:00 PM AVT 7-431

SEPTEMBER 8
"Building Schools in Sierra Leone"
Dr. Jonathan Bart, President of Village Hope, Inc.
SEPTEMBER 15 
"Freedom of Formfinding"
Laurent Ney, Principal and Founder of Ney & Partners in Brussels, Belgium.
OCTOBER 6
"Greening an Architecture Practice"
Meredith Elbaum, Senior Associate and Director of 
Sustainable Design at Sasaki Associates.
OCTOBER 27
"Recent Works"
Dr. Steven Van Dessel, Associate Professor at the Department
of Architecture and Urban Planning at Ghent University, Belgium.
NOVEMBER 3
"Structuring Light: Three Explorations by James Carpenter"
Joseph Welker, Senior Designer at James Carpenter Design Associates.

DO SOMETHING USEFUL

DO SOMETHING USEFUL

Anish Kapoor Exhibition

The History of Sculpture is the History of Materials.

These are two of the very interesting Anish Kapoor's works presented in the Boston ICA, which is by the way the building designed by Diller+Scofidio. Kapoor is constantly dealing with issues of corporeality, our perception of space and our illusions of stability and change. Through his installations you can explore the three-dimensionality of space and go beyond the familiar in the abstract darkness of our universe. This was the first time I had the chance to elaborate on his work. Kapoor's concept is a constant reevaluation of architectural space as we know it, moreover his work with new emerging materials shows there is also an alternative or at least side way of elaborating on technology. Aesthetics is crucial part of the architecture project. Materials can perform in an optimal way as building components and at the same time produce a wide range of aesthetic effects, rarely utilized so far in our buildings.

Acadia_Silicon and Skin

The Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) together with the Digital Design Consortium in the School of Architecture and Computer Science at the University of Minnesota will hold the ACADIA 2008 conference in Minneapolis. The upcoming conference entitled Silicon + Skin: Biological Processes and Computation fosters design work and research from the worlds of practice and academia which lie at the intersection between design, biology, and computation. More specifically, this conference seeks to identify and examine current trends in digital design technologies developed and applied in the framework of biologically inspired processes and digitally assisted sustainable design.

Message from the Directors

Read Comment

Summer Reading

The list below covers several basic sources in the broad Design, Technology and Environmental Studies area that are widely used at the GSD.  The list is long and there is no expectation that you should be familiar with all of these sources prior to coming to the GSD, but you should look over the list with respect to your own interest area and start becoming acquainted with the relevant works.

DESIGN TECHNOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

In general, Antoine Picon’s French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment provides historical background to the development of technology in architecture that should be of interest to all of you.  For those of you interested in materials should especially take a look at Smart Materials and Technologies and Fernandez’ Materials and Design.  Those of you interested in design computation should look at Expressive Form: A Conceptual Approach to Computational Design, Architecture and Science, The Language of New Media, Architecture and Sciences: Exchanging Metaphors, and Digital Design and Manufacturing: CAD/CAM Applications in Architecture and Design.  Product Design and Development and Mass Customization are especially suitable for students interested in product/industrial design. Students with this interest should also look at Digital Design and Manufacturing and the books on materials. Students interested in environmental issues should look at the collection of essays by GSD Faculty in the Harvard Design Magazine No.18.  It is a good collection of essays on all sides of the environmental debate.  Readings in other areas will be assigned in individual courses. Student interested in structures could read Innovative Surface Structures, an in-depth introduction to rigid shells and membranes. For those of you interested in BIM we recommend the BIM Handbook (Eastman et.al.).

Soap Bubbles

The following is an abstract from Archinect's article on Aug. 28

Broadly speaking, construction of the Beijing Water Cube (Olympic's Aquatic Center) proceeded in two phases: erection of the framing and installation of the cladding. The architects and engineers conceived of the internal structure, or skeleton, as an extension of the arcane Weaire-Phelan principle. In 1993, physicists Denis Weaire and Robert Phelan set out to find the answer to an aged scientific mystery—how the shape of soap bubbles is formed. They discovered that these shapes aspire toward maximal volume for minimal surface area; thus, they observed that cohering bubbles aren't round, but rather odd-sided polyhedrons, all clung together in an organic array of shared-sides that resembles naturally occurring structures: the honeycombs of a beehive or the osmotic renderings of a cell. 

They next developed a geographic model that reproduced this randomized lattice-work, then experimented with virtual slices of these shapes. The result is the seemingly-random (but repetitive enough to be feasible to construct) pattern visible on the exterior walls of the Cube. In tangible terms, then, the building's skeleton is constructed of steel girders—nothing intrinsically thrilling about that—but the shapes sketched by the girders are something else entirely. Not your usual complex of criss-crosses, of triangles and trusses, the Aquatic Center's members mimic the dazzlingly random patterns of agitated water.

Red_line

second experiment on color and the RGB (red, green, blue) mode_

RGB

[ Natural landscape in the process of becoming digital ]

Landsapes are as much the product of projection as they are of interpretation.

Moreover everytime it is a matter of the techniques and the technologies we employ instrumentally on the landscape,

the landscape in turn revealing the precise limits of these technologies. 

Indeed it can be argued that there is nothing to the landscape beyond these technologies,

that both are made visible by their mutual projections.

Atlas Of Novel Tectonics, Reiser + Umemoto abstract_pg 208

pin_ball

Stain

getting_ready

Materiality and beyond

" The microdomain of the virus is that in which the tobacco-mosaic experiments first showed that the domain of the virus is apparently the threshold between what we have known in the past as the inanimate and the animate. The virus follows all the behavioral rules of inanimate crystal, but also follows all the laws of animate biology. It is both animate and inanimate- in fact as a threshold it overlaps both. It does not divide them. It calls for a totally new concept of what we are physically; it asks just how physical is life and what is unique to the individual? Within the virus we have the famous DNA and RNA, the nucleic acids of four chemical compounds whose interpatterning sequences in helixes control all the patterning and all the designs of life." 

[Fuller_Prevailing Conditions in the Arts]. 

If this is the case, how animated can materials and utterly buildings become? It is already obvious that a building responds as a living organism to it's environments,through heat exchange etc., but how literal can that become? Living tissues embedded in building materials could make buildings grow in time, and utterly die at some point! And regenerate_ That could lead to a new building ecology. Building could just grow following a genetic code of some sort, and then architecture would eventually be bio-architecture, or biotecture, a whole new domain. But before getting to extremities we could anyway have materials "perform" one with another, possibly on-site, through chemical reactions.

Biotecture seems to be old-news though. As a term at least, it has been used some times now to speak of sustainable design, green roofs, breathing facades etc. And it has indeed been used once or twice in the way implied before. The closest example seems to be the project at MIT some years ago, the "Fab Tree House"- a proper home constructed almost entirely from living trees and plants. The "Fab Tree House"uses an ancient technique called pleaching- where branches are woven together to form lattice structures.

Tim McKeough, ("The new Climate Almanac: Grow your own Home") ironically points out that biotecture may seem far-fetched, but the tools to build a tree house already exist. 

But you can never know..