Description:
Architecture, is a practice that is strongly correlated to the process of breaking things into smaller discrete elements as a way of construction. This as a material practice becomes ever more interesting in today’s architectural landscape where we see an ever increasing number of buildings with ties to complex geometry, which have inevitably lead to an even increased need for geometrical control within architectural practice.
Therefore, this workshop will playfully explore explicit and implicit mesh modeling techniques as a scaffold for geometrical discretisation explorations, with the aim to understand their effect on the material manifestation of a design. The designs will explore and understand the relationship between tensile and compressive structures, through a prototypical process that will be guided by tools and techniques found in practice that have been used on projects at various scales.
The study will be conducted through parametrization, analysis, optimization and form-finding to investigate structural behaviour and automated production processes. We are interested in harnessing the engrained geometric or structural physical properties of materials. The workshop topic will unfold through Rhino and Grasshopper, where participants will be presented with a toolbar designed for the workshop. This will support mesh discretisation through clustering and mesh-walk techniques using algorithms such as kMeans and Breadth-First- Search (BFS). These will be used to treat implicitly available geometrical information such as surface curvature, normal direction or topology as the driver for the process leading to fabrication as a direct result of the design. Throughout the workshop, participants will be invited to build several small forms physically to test various assembly strategies, thereby informing the digital process.
Expected Skill Level : Intermediate knowledge of Rhinoceros and Grasshopper.
Requirements: Laptop with Rhino 6 and Grasshopper
Tutors:
Jens Pedersen and Spyros Efthymiou
Bio:
Jens Pedersen is a graduate from Aarhus Architecture School and holds a MSc in Emergent Technologies & Design from the Architectural Association. He has led several workshops in computational design and published papers most recently at the Design Modelling Symposium in Paris. He is currently a computational designer within P.art, the applied research team at AKTII.
Spyros Efthymiou is an architectural engineer, researcher and educator. Currently he is working as a computational designer at the Parametric Applied Research team at AKT II in London.In parallel, he explores and teaches computational design research methodologies in the UK and abroad.He holds a degree in Architectural Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens [N.T.U.A] and a Master of Science at the Emergent Technologies and design programme from the Architectural Association school of architecture.
Together the workshop leaders have many years of experience in computational design and the construction of free-form geometries within architecture, art and structural engineering. They have worked on a number of projects recently that utilise the techniques deployed in this workshop, and are excited about bringing these strands of research and industrial development together at AAG 2018.