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.
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!
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 March, taking advantage of my stay in Barcelona, I made some RhinoScript consultancies in Affonso Orciuoli’s course about digital fabrication in the Biodigital Architecture Master program at ESARQ. They also had Pablo Baquero and Daniel Wunsch as collaborators. Some contents are posted on the blog CadCam Architectural Approaches.
Thanks to Affonso for inviting me to his course and to Pablo for inviting to the blog.
On March, 2009, I taught along with Dennis Dollens, a workshop on biomimetic strategies of design through algorithmic techniques for the production of architectural design ideas, in the Biodigital Architecture Master program at ESARQ - UIC, Barcelona.
On April, 2009, in number 181 of Brazilian aU Magazine, Affonso Orciuoli published the article: TI aplicada à arquitetura: o antes e o depois (IT applied in architecture: before and after), in which he exposes the uses of scripting, parametric modeling and digital fabrication in architecture. He mentions some experiences like our Tooling workshop or the Radiolarian Walls project and shows one of my experiments: the Honeycomb script. This is a simplification of Andrew Kudless’ script that I’ve originally prepared for teaching RhinoScript. Here is shown in a mid stage. Recent versions have improved efficiency making a more elegant code.
Thanks to Affonso for inviting me to collaborate in his article.
Em abril de 2009, no numero 181 da brasileira Revista aU, Affonso Orciuoli publicou o artigo: TI aplicada à arquitetura: o antes e o depois, no cual ele expõe os usos do Scripting, a modelagem paramétrica e a fabricação digital na arquitetura. Ele menciona algumas experiencias como o nosso Tooling workshop ou o projeto das paredes radiolárias e mostra um dos meus experimentos: o script do Honeycomb. Este é uma simplificação do script do Andrew Kudless, que preparei originalmente para dar aula de RhinoScript. Aqui mostra-se numa etapa média. Versões recentes têm uma eficiência melhorada, providenciando um código mais elegante.
Obrigado ao Affonso por invitar-me a colaborar no seu artigo.
During academic year 2008-2009, Professor Antonio Sanmartín and T.A. Marc Camallonga invited me to do an advice in their last year Architectural Projects class, in the undergraduate program at ESARQ – UIC.
Although they don’t consider themselves up to date in matters of digital technologies in architecture, they have a very interesting approach to encourage students to design algorithmically and, by doing so, evolving beyond XXth century. They begin by studying parameters to create variables from site and context, and also from a very different income: literature. They chose a novel and distributed it, one chapter per student, to generate a diagram from it (in the very Eisenman style!).
My contribution began doing a short lecture on algorithmic design and giving what they called the ‘Ocurt’ assignment: to take the diagram and site variables and develop a complex surface out of them by an algorithmic strategy. Remembering Karl Chu’s reconsideration of Eisenman, I taught them a strategy of synthesizing data and mapping it on a base shape, based on Chu’s morphogenetic approach that he teaches in the Master by an analogic algorithmic strategy (without programming).
In a more advanced stage, I was called for a second 'Ocurt' assignment: a digital fabrication plan. After suggesting some reference reading on the subject, a CAD/CAM strategy was applied to the developed architectural element, so that it could be fabricated in the CNC machine of the school. Some cases required basic training in rationalization of complex surfaces with PanelingTools.
The image shows some student projects at different stages. Photos by Marc Camallonga.
Thanks to Alberto T. Estévez for recommending me to Antonio Sanmartín for this class.
