01:03
Fornes / Nowak / Corcilius: From DIN to DIM
For a different take and a different scripting language, go read theverymany, Marc Fornes’ blog on his experiments in computational architecture. 98% of his blog so far is Rhinoscript code for creating generative structures, accompanied by intriguing illustrations. It makes you want to work with Rhino just to be able to see it run.
For those who don’t know it, Rhinoscript is a VBScript language used to control Rhino, a high-end 3D package used for anything from CAD/CAM and visualization to computer animation. Rhino is popular with coding architects, sculptors and CGI heads alike. It’s not as old skool as AutoCAD and AutoLISP, which has been used for computational architecture since 1986. But it’s likely a lot more useful.
theverymany is refreshingly focused on sketches and code, but there is documentation of one interesting recent project: "From DIN to DIM", a “series of experimentations looking at transitions between the German Standard of design to self-similar objects controled by declared variables…”. Done with Vincent Nowak and Claudia Corcilius, it consists of generative formal studies, using nested loops to generate structure.
As with much computational architecture, the results are visually very compelling. The techno-organic tower structures recall fashions in blobby architecture, while simultaneously reminding one of 70s sci-fi book covers. The translation of simple code structures into complex and appealing form seems effortless, it would certainly be interesting to see the slides shown in higher detail.
Marc Fornes is a graduate of the AA's Digital Research Labotary class, and is currently working as an architect for Zaha Hadid Ltd. He indicates in the sidebar of his blog that his rhinoscript library might be available as open source.
16:02
Realities:United: SPOTS media facade
Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz is getting new eyes. The SPOTS media facade opens Sunday on the Park Kolonnaden building. SPOTS will be a gallery for a series of curated art projects for public space. Commissioned by ad agency Café Palermo Pubblicità for HVB Immobilien AG, the installation was designed by Realities:United, a Berlin-based architecture studio with previous experience in creating large-scale light installations. Their BIX facade for Kunsthaus Graz garnered much international attention, and won them more than a few awards.
SPOTS will last for 18 months, with four commissioned works by Jim Campbell, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Carsten Nicolai and Realities:United in collaboration with John Dekron. The selection was curated by Andreas Broeckmann, director of the Transmediale festival. Visitors to Transmediale 2006 will have a chance to see all four works, as they are shown one per day in a special showing for the festival.
It should be noted that Potsdamer Platz is a problematic space in Berlin. Depending on who you ask, it’s either a symbol of regeneration or an attempt to erase history. A vibrant city center in the 1920s, it was practically destroyed in World War II and then divided by the Berlin Wall. It became a no-go zone, empty and desolate.
With the Wall down in 1989, the empty Potsdamer Platz became a prime investment opportunity and saw aggressive commercial development. The area is now dominated by corporate headquarters, three cinema multiplexes, restaurants and a shopping mall. The Sony Center is one of the most ambitious building projects in the area, and has achieved iconic status. While detractors will lecture you on the horrors of modern architecture and inorganic urban planning, the area is a de facto success, with 70 000 visitors per day.
The official opening is Sunday November 27 (tomorrow) at 17:00, so if you’re in the neighbourhood you can catch the official presentation of the project. Be sure to bring warm clothes.
11:36
This looks like an interesting book. The Architectural Design series from Wiley has long been excellent chroniclers of new trends in technology-based architecture practices.
The book has world-class contributors like Ron Arad, Usman Haque and several other usual suspects. Curiously, the French architect François Roche of R&Sie is absent (Bruce Sterling writes about him here, as is Toyo Ito (although in Ito’s case that might be due to his being over-published…)
09:00
Pablo Carranza: Evolved cantilever
Pablo Carranza: Swarm intelligence
Pablo Miranda Carranza is a Spanish architect who studied in London and now resides in Stockholm, where he teaches at the Royal Institute of Technology. His work is concerned with self-designing and intelligent structures, using artificial life and sensory inputs to explore new structures and spaces.
His recent work Responsive Fields 2 (with Tobi Schneidler) was shown at the Algorithmic revolution show at the ZKM in Karlsruhe. RF2 is an interactive architectural model where the user’s hands are tracked by sensors, through which they influence a population of agents living in a virtual space. The project is a continuation of the previous work Responsive field of lattice archipelogics.
Carranza has worked for several years at the Interactive Institute in Stockholm, an experimental lab for intradisciplinary media work. He has exhibited internationally at ZKM, SF MoMA , UCLA and the Centre Pompidou among others.
Some sample projects:
- Responsive Fields 2 (with Tobi Schneidler)
- ArchiKluge
- Self designed structures
- Enactive Space
14:02
CityEngine: Spiral cities
Pascal Mueller's Wiki has more information on the CityEngine project, including movies, lecture slides and more pictures of modelled cities. The pictures of the process are particularly interesting, as it shows the tiny steps involved.
Sci-fi fans should take a look at the Level City, while hardcore rendering fans should look at this detailed city render. Movies are also available, including a fly-through of the detailed city.
Pascal is also implicated in pop culture applications of technology through the collaborative media art project CoreBounce and live visuals group Scheinwerfer.
09:32
Two classic out-of-print books on generative systems online for free perusal in PDF format:
- Prusinkiewicz & Lindenmayer: The Algorithmic Beauty of Plants
Classic text on the algorithmic modelling of plants, using formal grammars known as L-systems. This very comprehensive book describes models of varying complexity, from single leaves to flowers and finally trees etc. L-systems were invented by Lindenmayer in 1968 to model the morphology of various organisms, for more information see the wikipedia definition: L-system.
The Algorithmic Botany site where the book is available is the website of the Biological Modeling and Visualization research group at the University of Calgary, and contains numerous related papers and resources.
- John Frazer: An Evolutionary Architecture
In this book, John Frazer describes 30 years of work with evolutionary strategies for form-generating processes. Coming out of the interest in system-based architecture in the 1960s, Frazer and colleagues propose organic architectural systems inspired by artificial life and shape grammars.
23:06
biot(h)ing: swells
biot(h)ing is the research-design laboratory of alisa andrasek – creating and studying algorithmically derived structures in virtual and physical environments.
Computational design processes are used to dynamically manipulate the conditions of various surface systems. The presentation of the project “swells” for example shows the different steps how a network of genetically scripted cells is transfered from the screen to the surface of a high-rise building.
02:41
Example model of New York City, copyright CentralPictures
From ComputerGraphica: Yoav I H Parish and Pascal Müller from CentralPictures, Switzerland has created an impressive procedural model for modeling cities. Their technique is capable of simulating a complete city from a “comparatively small set of statistical and geographical input data”.
Parameters include elevation maps, land/water/vegetation maps, population density, zone maps (residential, commercial or mixed zones), street patterns and maximal house height maps.
From their abstract:
For the creation of a city street map, L-systems have been extended with methods that allow the consideration of global goals and local constraints and reduce the complexity of the production rules. An L-system that generates geometry and a texturing system based on texture elements and procedural methods compose the buildings.
They have their original SIGGRAPH 2001 paper on the technique online:
CityEngine paper
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