✎ 15 Aug 2021
It has been far too long since I last wrote a post. I had an idea of automating conversion of 3D scan point cloud data to 2D drawings in my head for a while but I have been focusing much on my professional work for the past few months and haven’t got the time to test it out. My writing might be a bit rusty,but one thing at a time. 3D scans and point-clouds are amazing. They could be very, sometimes even too, detailed and provide understanding of existing building far greater than topographical drawings and photos. However, it is somehow to difficult to convert to 2-dimensional vector drawings for overlaying and taking measurements. It should be noted that some point cloud preview software (ReCap) let you interact a bit with the model and output some 2D information in raster […]
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✎ 22 Sep 2019
Through my programming adventures I began to notice some inefficiency of traditional CAD design. It is common for architectural designers to start their designs nearly from scratch in order to address the uniqueness of a brief, client or site. However this logically may increase design time which is important factor for the industry. The following chapter by Robert Nystrom describes a design pattern in relation to game programming, but many parallels could be drawn between game and architecture design particularly content generation and processing times. The given examples for creating a forest by generating thousands of unique trees may easily been a village with houses, what is important here is the way unique and shared properties could be separated once identified. The fog lifts, revealing a majestic old growth forest. Ancient hemlocks, countless in number, tower over you forming a […]
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✎ 01 Jan 2019
Strong ties between biology and architecture and study of evolutionary algorithms raise suspicions that evolutionary processes can: 1. allow computers to automate and speed up typical design tasks, 2. be utilised to optimise design artefacts and 3. be used for generation of novel solutions. The research presents the past achievements on the topic thought analysis of texts and case studies without being overly technical. At it's core, the paper was written to demonstrate designers a way to step away from traditional use of computers as digital drawing boards, scratches the surface of design automation and in a very metaphorical sense portraits symbiosis between man and machine.
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✎ 02 Dec 2018
Engineers love Excel. I don’t think anyone will ever be able to count all of the ‘countless’ spreadsheets that engineers at our and other offices have created over the past decades to help speed up repetitive tasks, and to make our lives easier. Many of these spreadsheets work in conjunction with geometry engines such as AutoCAD, or even with other analysis tools. Here is an example: for every typical structural project, we have to take down column loads to help us determine the size of the structural columns. The typical workflow would be to geometrically assign each portion of a floor of a building to their nearest column, and then to multiply the area of the floor portion with a number of factors for dead loads, live loads and superimposed dead loads. Finally, all of these numbers have to be […]
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✎ 02 Dec 2018
We’ve always been a profession of hackers. Every building is a one-off made up of countless elegant hacks, each bringing disparate materials and systems together into a cohesive whole. But when it comes to the software that designers have come to rely on, most of us have been content with enthusiastic consumerism, eagerly awaiting the next releases from software developers like Autodesk, McNeel (Rhino) and Bentley (MicroStation). It’s been 5 years since we officially launched our research program at the Yazdani Studio of Cannon Design, and during that period we’ve come to understand the evolution of our process reflects the larger, changing relationship architects have with their means of production. Specifically, we’ve noticed that in late 2007 something changed. McNeel introduced a visual programming plugin called Grasshopper, and more and more architects began to hack their tools as well as […]
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✎ 10 Oct 2018
In 2014 renowned Dutch politician Neelie Kroes, then a commissioner for the European Union, stated that coding should be taught in elementary school in the Netherlands, arguing that “Coding is the reading and writing of the future” and that if the Dutch didn’t incorporate it into their education system it would fall behind school systems in other countries. The reactions to both Kroes’ statement and Michael Kilkelly’s article “5 Reasons Architects Should Learn To Code” were quite similar. Those already capable of writing code agreed; many who have never even seen, let alone written any script responded negatively. Many reactions to Micheal Kilkelly’s article covered the same ideas: “There’s no time!” “Coding is not designing!” Or just plain, “No!” As an urban designer I do a lot of similar tasks when developing masterplans. Because nobody in the office managed the […]
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✎ 10 Oct 2018
CORE studio is pleased to announce Design Explorer, an open source tool for exploring design spaces on the web. We’ve been working on this project on and off for well over a year now and we’ve presented it a number of times, but we’ve never written about it. Shame on us! Over the next few weeks, we will publish a series of blog posts about the project’s goals, the natural history of design space tools in AEC, and how Thornton Tomasetti and others are using Design Explorer in practice. This first post will focus on the current state of the project and the main problems that Design Explorer is trying to solve. The first problem will be familiar to anyone who has done any parametric and/or computational modeling: parametric models give you too many iterations. Of the multitude of possible states […]
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