Recently, the government of Rio de Janeiro implemented a policy of urban redevelopment that recognises the importance of providing space for the local creative economy of the Samba Schools within the Port of Rio de Janeiro, after having ignored their incorporation within the Porto de Maravilha Waterfront Regeneration Project. Using this new incorporation strategy as our impetus, the Rio de Janeiro Visiting School will work directly with this initiative and aim to broaden its scope and accessibility in an attempt to foster a diverse public space for the Cidade de Samba (Samba City) infrastructure, a large warehouse complex built by the city for the top Samba Schools in the Port of Rio, which currently has no connection to the waterfront cruise-terminal tourist infrastructure, nor any type of amenities for the general public.For more info: brazilvisitingschool@aaschool.ac.uk or +55 11 3062-3522
The projects will include the design of both permanent structures and temporary interactive installations transforming the existing closed production area of Samba City into an open space linked to proposed leisure itineraries along the waterfront. Structures will be designed with computational design methods and built with digital fabrication techniques with the assistance of local artisans combining new materials and processes with reappropriated Carnival paraphernalia. Students will build both models and partial one-to-one prototypes of their urban, architectural and interactive design proposals.
Instruction for the Visiting School workshop series will be led by AA Tutors and Assistants and local architects and specialists, the Escola de Carnaval Artistic Directors, and Carnival float-fabricators. Specifically, participants will learn computational design using rhino, grasshopper, processing, and arduino as well as the use of c.n.c. milling and routing, laser cutting and rapid-prototyping. No previous experience is necessary. The workshop is open to architecture and design students and professionals worldwide.
The baixo-centre Barra Funda of São Paulo, was once characterized by a vibrant mix of small industrial, commercial and residential programmes. Yet, as economic policies over time favoured a monopolization of larger production industries, companies abandoned the city centre and moved to the periphery and abroad. Rather than solely introducing new programs for the post-industrial landscape, the workshop proposes the creation of new-types of micro industries to produce a mix of both consumption and production within the centre, thus creating an urban policy of 'pro-sumption', manifested through micro-manufacturing interventions that can co-exist alongside retail and housing. The workshop posits that innovative computational design and digital fabrication can be used to help create these new micro-industries, as these new technologies bring increased productivity levels with a decreased use of space, which can help empower local craftsman to produce and sell directly to potential consumers through on-demand, micro-manufacturing in small urban workshops which can be easily implanted within the centre.
The workshop will tap into the energy of the emergent gallery-scene of Barra Funda, and the activities of local micro-agencies that plan to use computational technology to introduce a new cultural and economic movement for the centre. The workshop will propose prototype models for micro-industries using computational design and digital fabrication, while participants actually learn and use these technologies, including Rhino, Grasshopper, their related plug-ins, and arduino, as well as the use of the laser-cutter, rapid-prototype machines and CNC routers and mills, to produce 1:1 scale interventions within the city to further promote this new movement. The workshop will be a part of the 2012 International Festival of Electronic Language (F.I.L.E.), an avant-garde exhibition of interactive electronic technology. The workshop will suggest ways these electronic technologies can be imported out of the gallery and into a new cooperative micro-economy of the neighborhood. For this we will work directly with local Barra Funda manufacturers and artists introducing digital technologies to their local fabrication processes, including the Resinfloor Barra Funda small factory, using resin both as a finishing agent as well as within digitally fabricated milled molds, for example, inventing a type of `high-tech/low-tech` liquid fabrication process. The workshop will also collaborate with the local Metamáquina D.I.Y. rapid prototype machine manufacturers, whose goal of diseminating a high-tech, yet low-cost and small-scale fabrication system, can further promote this micro-industrial movement.
The urban depth emerges physically and sensitively in different manners, in an arrange specific to the user and to the multiple relations made possible by the city, inside a connectivity between the parts and the whole. Distinct components link forming an interlocked arrangement structurally specific to the site.It was an excellent opportunity to investigate generative systems of lightweight structures and complex connections. We start from a Delaunay triangulation of a pseudo-random network differentially extruded following a set of attractor curves and we extend the connecting nodes’ geometry to stabilize the structural parts in the direction perpendicular thereto. This extension changed the secondary status of the connectors, turning them the main pieces. The whole parametric process consists of five Grasshopper definitions and one RhinoScript separated in stages to allow team work. As a result, 540 unique pieces of polystyrene were CNC cut and assembled with screws.
L-E-G is a design research group based on Learning and Experience. We believe in a continuous and progressive acquisition of knowledge through time and collaboration. The research aims to explore self-organization, complexity and collective intelligence on social, material and biological systems.We're already studying and planning some interesting stuff that I'm looking forward to announce here as well.
Based on Curitiba (Brazil), L-E-G is formed by a young group of professionals inspired on people, society and nature. It doesn’t compromise with any school of arts or architecture, but only with time, technology and human being.
L-E-G has three main objectives: Explore, Learn and Teach. Explore through intensive research, critic analysis and experimentation; Learn through time and collaboration; Teach by making the knowledge available to people through exhibitions, lectures, workshops and papers.
The aim of this programme is to rehabilitate environments, populations and materials through the use of innovative computational ecological design and digital fabrication processes. With these tactics we will define a new generation of digital design that employs both high-tech and low-tech strategies. Parametric design generation and digital fabrication techniques will be used to computationally redesign low-tech building strategies, mixing high-tech expertise with local labour knowledge. One objective of the workshop is to transform sustainable design strategies so as to bring to ecological design a new aesthetic and social agenda.
This high-tech/low-tech strategy will include environmental registration and mediation, using high-tech agent-controlled computational design and environmental and structural simulation, to design both high-tech and low-tech environmental mediation systems. The workshop will script the calibration of devices to respond to multiple forces – structural and cultural as well as environmental forces. The goal is to create spatial organisations for various programmes, settings and building types, using different structured environmental devices and networking them within larger cultural and ecological systems of the urban setting.
The workshop will be a part of the FILE - Electronic Language International Festival, a yearly forum for avant-garde digital art in the iconic FIESP building. Open to architecture and design professionals and students, the studio-based workshop will include instruction in parametric modelling, environmental simulation software, Rhino Grasshopper, (including plug-ins GECO, Kangaroo and Galapagos), Rhino Python Recursive Iterations, as well as Processing and Arduino, and digital fabrication processes using laser-cutting and CNC-milling machines to produce design proposals, physical models and one-to-one prototypes. The course will be taught by tutors from the AA School, including Robert Stuart Smith of Kokkugia, Anne Save de Beaurecueil from SUBdV and Sandro Tubertini from Environmental Engineering Agency, BDSP. It will also feature lectures by Brazilian and international architects, urban planners and other specialists.
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| Atelier Utrabo Monteiro - MORF-ING furniture at Aldeia Coworking |
Some time has passed and I still don't have too much time to keep up with the posting. At least, I've post some nice things at Parametricismo. They are in Portuguese, but translation services have improved a lot lately. Ether way, here are some quick notes:
Co-working in Curitiba: The first results of the collaboration I'm doing at Atelier UM are finally shown. In December we finished a great interior design project for the first co-working in Curitiba. My participation is focused on the design, fabrication and on-site assembly of two key elements: the now-called: MON-TA tables; and an awesome 27-meter-wide parametric furniture that could be seen as a bookshelf that 'morph' itself to support reading, working, chatting and storage (in some nice lockers).
Final
thesis presentations at UniCEUB: On December, 15, the first
generation of trained Architects with Grasshopper skills in Brazil has
graduated! Eduardo Crosara, Maria Gabriella Nunes, Raquel Barcellos and
Rodrigo Cruz dos Santos where participants, along with their professor
Beatriz de Abreu e Lima, in a workshop
there in Brasilia, and they where kind enough to invite me to most
of their thesis presentations including the final one.
Algorithmic Design Techniques at ESARQ: Last week I finished teaching a RhinoScripting seminar in the Master's in Biodigital Architecture at ESARQ - UIC. What a great experience. Since I have to stay in Barcelona for some more days, I'm listening to Neal Leach's seminar which is really good.
AA Rio Design Workshop: I'm invited to teach again in an AA Visiting School workshop, this time from April 5 - 14 in Rio the Janeiro. I'll be one of the Computation Tutors to get participants to produce projects that will fuse carnival's paraphernalia reuse with digital design and fabrication. I struggled a bit to translate the original press release to Portuguese for Parametricismo, and I'm happy to see that other people are reusing the translated text to disseminate the event.
Curso FUPAM: Arquitetura e Projeto na era Digital: A big course I'm going to teach along with some great local professors in Sao Paulo. Digital design and fabrication meets BIM! (waiting for confirmation, for august now).
There is a lot more to come, but I'll have to confirm first... I'll be a pretty busy year!
The press office of Caterina Tiazzoldi / Nuova Ordentra contacted me to publish their project Toolbox - Torino Office Lab & Co-working. I was very pleased to post such a nice work on Parametricismo.
Caterina Tiazzoldi is a Researcher at NSU, Columbia University and Faculty at Politecnico de Torino, where she also has her practice. She owns the blog Digital Primitive, along with Eduardo Benamor Duarte.
I did the translation to Portuguese with the great help of Gonçalo Castro Henriques, for what is the first collaboration we do together as blog editors.
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| AA_NAI_SP_WORKSHOP by Kim Azevedo on Facebook |
In some of the courses I’ve taught, people asked me how to make the structures of these workshop poster images. In this post I show the osseous truss pavilion that I generated to be the image of the workshop at SIGraDi 2009 that I taught along with Gonçalo Castro Henriques.
It is a system originally developed in Grasshopper 0.60019, based on the Surface Box-Box Morph combination explained in section "11.2 Paneling Tools" of the Grasshopper Primer, by Andrew Payne and Rajaa Issa (p.79-83). The first difference is in the prototype that makes the unit of the truss (or geometric pattern, as is referred in the tutorial). In the beginning it was made directly on Rhino, from NURBS curves of degree 2, closing the three points of the triangle of the diagonal division of a square. For this update, the prototype is generated entirely in Grasshopper, using only the grids of control points.
But the key for this to work as the structure from the image is on the topology of the base surface. The base surface of this pavilion is designed in Rhino, lofting between curves that were previously oriented, point by point, to begin longitudinal, grow to become transversal and end longitudinal again, bending over to make a sort of bridge with two supports. The deformation of these surface isocurves was inspired by the stereographic projections of Cartesian grids.
Posted in Parametricismo.
Download here the updated definition for Grasshopper 0.60059.
The name Parametricism was coined by Patrik Schumacher in: Parametricism as Style - Parametricist Manifesto, originally presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2008. The idea is being criticized, among other things, because it’s being questioned whether it is valid to continue classifying architecture in styles or trends. Two years have passed and still we haven’t heard many people use the term.
Probably the word Parametricismo won’t be included in Spanish or Portuguese language dictionaries in the near future as well. So I thought it was a good name for a blog in Portuguese on parametric and generative modeling in Architecture and Design.
Thus, the blog formerly known as Design Paramétrico – UP, —born from a workshop I taught at Universidade Positivo, Curitiba— has reborn as Parametricismo to express a more open but still specific web resource about these technologies and methods, with links, news, workshops and other experiences, published mainly in Portuguese, which is unprecedented so far.
I’m already working on it on Twitter and Facebook, and also waiting to confirm some interesting collaborations coming…
El 18 de junio, al recientemente galardonado Profesor Gonzalo Vélez Jahn, se le hizo entrega del premio Francisco De Venanzi, importante reconocimiento a la trayectoria en investigación en la Universidad Central de Venezuela en el área de Ciencias, Ingeniería y Arquitectura.
Su hijo Roman Vélez, tuvo la gentileza de compartir su experiencia de asistir al evento y documentarlo en fotos y video. También cedió una copia de la carta de postulación que escribió el Profesor Pedro Luís Hippolyte, antiguo docente del LTAD y actual Coordinador de Investigación de la EACRV – FAU – UCV, de la cual cito:
“A lo largo de su carrera profesional, por más de 50 años, se le considera pionero –en Venezuela- en el campo de la Computación aplicada a la Arquitectura. Fundó en el año 1974 el Laboratorio de Técnicas Avanzadas en Diseño, el cual durante sus 30 años formó estudiantes, profesores e investigadores en la […] Universidad Central de Venezuela y otras universidades del país. En la Facultad de Arquitectura de La Universidad del Zulia impulsó y desarrolló la opción de computación en la maestría de arquitectura.
Ha sido un visionario en el uso de las nuevas tecnologías aplicadas a la arquitectura como la Realidad Virtual, Comunidades Virtuales, Educación a Distancia y las Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación; promovió y desarrolló los primeros encuentros virtuales en Internet […].
Fue uno de los miembros fundadores de la Sociedad Iberoamericana de Gráfica Digital – SIGRADI […]. Participó y coordinó los Congresos Virtuales de Arquitectura 2000 – 2001, Congreso Venezolano de Aplicación de Computadoras en Arquitectura CONVEACA 1999 y 2001 […].
Es un investigador nato; así lo demuestran los numerosos artículos publicados en revistas especializadas y conferencias magistrales dictadas a nivel nacional […] e internacional […].”
Nosotros, los antiguos integrantes del LTAD nos llenamos de alegría y orgullo de ver a nuestro maestro ser reconocido después de tantos años de valiosos aportes a nuestra disciplina y a nuestra Alma Mater.
¡Muchas felicitaciones, Gonzalo!
From July 16 to July 24 I’m going to collaborate in the workshop: Micro-Revolutions: AA – NAi Design Workshop São Paulo (AA Visiting School), at Espaço de Cultura Contemporânea Escola São Paulo, which promises to be a great event:
The goal of the joint Architectural Association and Netherlands Institute of Architects (AA- NAi) Design Workshop in São Paulo is to explore the rehabilitation of otherwise obsolete, residual and overlooked urban environments, communities and physical materials, through critical urban analysis seminars, as well as through the use of innovative computational design and digital fabrication processes. […]
The intense, studio-based workshop, which will be open to designers from all over the world, will include extensive digital parametric modelling design tutorials using Rhino Grasshopper and Rhino Scripting, computer-numerically controlled (CNC) fabrication, including rapid-prototype, laser cutting and CNC routing and milling. Evening seminars and a full-day Forum will include lectures and contributions from both Brazilian and international architects, designers, urban planners, street artists, photographers and other specialists. […]
Quoted text and images: http://saopaulo.aaschool.ac.uk/
Due to the specific theme and schedule, the contents of the workshop Territórios de Ambigüidade - Oficina de Estratégia Avançada de Projeto e Desenho Paramétrico was oriented to morphing, overlaying, grading and other strategies for contrasts negotiation, according to contextual parameters, in many cases at urban scale, but also with special emphasis (at least theoretically) in digital fabrication.
We were fortunate to have among participants Igor Lacroix, an architect who, in his office protoarq, has a 3D printer. He developed a resin prototype (image 2) and polyethylene prototype (image 3) from class exercises.
The fourth image shows the model of Lucas Martino (Photo: Beatriz de Abreu e Lima), on the issue of triangulation and 2D cutting fabrication, executed on paper as an exercise.
The last image belongs to Maria Gabriella Gama, from her graduation project on the lawn of the Esplanada dos Ministérios (Brazilian Ministries Plateau).
Thanks to Beatriz for all the organization. I also thank the MS Desenhos staff for their support in the classroom.
On April 24 – 25 and May 15 – 16, I’ll teach a workshop for the development of parametric-generative strategies with Grasshopper for architectural design, conceptually exploiting the issue of contrasts and ambiguous territories in Brasilia’s public space. The workshop is coordinated by Beatriz de Abreu e Lima, and aimed primarily for her Architectural Projects’ students at Centro Universitario de Brasília.
The event will take place in the arts training school MS Desenhos, Brasilia, Brazil.