Ligações Urbanas Installation in Curitiba

Permanent installation commissioned to Atelier UM+D by the department of tourism of the City of Curitiba, for the information service center at Rua 24 Horas, completed in November 2011. To cite our release:

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.

Author: Atelier UM+D
Team: Gustavo Utrabo, Juliano Monteiro, Pedro Duschenes, Ernesto Bueno, Lucas Issey and Marcela Furtado.
Year: 2011.
Location: Rua 24 Horas, Curitiba, Brazil.
Status: Built.

More images on the Atelier UM+D website.

Update Notes #2

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!

Radiolarian Pavilion IJAC article is online

RhinoScript consulting for fabrication at ESARQ

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.

Radiolarian Pavilion paper to be published on IJAC

I’m pleased to announce that an academic paper on my participation in the Radiolarian pavilion project developed in RhinoScript at ESARQ - UIC has been accepted for publication in the next issue of the International Journal of Architectural Computing (IJAC), which is going to be Volume 7, Issue 04, November 2009.

Radiolarian Egg Pavilion

This is my contribution, done on March for an ongoing research project for a pavilion to hold a sculpture at the Barcelona campus of UIC, where the ESARQ is.

Like the other Radiolarian project, it’s conceived and directed by Alberto T. Estevez, head of the Genetic Architectures research line. It consists of an ovoid-shaped structure also designed as an interpretation of bone structures of Radiolarians. Its design develops a series of irregular hexagonal cells that are repeated in a tessellation of a surface and generate volumes that, following the logic of bone structures, are thickened at nodes forming spikes and leaving rounded holes.

The non-standard geometry outcomes from programming and modeling methods using RhinoScript and the Rhino3DE’s Math Plug-in.

Connections: Martin B. Henriksen

Martin B. Henriksen was a remarkable student of the Biodigital Architecture Master program at ESARQ – UIC. He made BioDigital Studies, a process blog for showing projects and images of his studies there.

ShiftArray function

All Grasshopper enthusiasts that have follow the software development from earlier stages know the Shift Example, a case-study of the Shift List component (animation copyrighted by Robert McNeel & Associates).

While doing a research project in RhinoScript, I suddenly faced the need for a function like that one in my algorithm and a migration of tools wasn't so viable, so I developed a ShiftArray function that does exactly that in RhinoScript. You just have to input the array for arrList and a shifting factor (as an integer) for s.

Algorithmic Digital-Biomimetic workshop at ESARQ

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.

RhinoScript lecture at ETSAB

On December, 2008, I did a lecture on NURBS modeling and algorithmic design with RhinoScript as part of a series of lectures from Affonso Orciuoli on digital technologies in architectural design and fabrication in Borja Ferrater's course of Diseño Parametrizado, part of the Proyectos XXI Master program at ETSAB – UPC, Barcelona.

Thanks to Affonso for inviting me to lecture there.

Phyllotaxis Tower

This is an idea for a skyscraper based on spiral phyllotaxis, like the sunflower system, that exhibits spiral pods always in Fibonacci numbers.

Honeycomb script published in aU

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.

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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.

Radiolarian Ceiling

Continuing my collaboration in the Radiolarian Walls project, I presented an alternative design for the ceilings, which served as the starting point for the continuation of that part of the project by other colleagues in the research line.

Also, I did some advice to these colleagues, suggested modeling strategies and developed some scripts to generate different patterns of holes for the roof.

Radiolarian Walls project

This is a project conceived and directed by Alberto T. Estévez within the Genetic Architectures research line at ESARQ. Is an opportunity to get research ideas to the real world, addressing a client of Estévez who requested the interiors of a therapy and treatment office in Barcelona.

The project consists of a system of dry-walls and ceilings designed as an interpretation of radiolarians bone structures. This project develops a series of hexagonal cells that repeats as a tessellation throughout a plane and, following a bone structure logic, generates volumes that get thicker at nodes, forming spikes and leaving circular holes. From the modeling point of view, this is done from a grid of hexagons, each with a circle inscribed in its center. The size of the circles corresponds to another system for increasing diameters that define it.

My work began when, due to a rethink on the size of wall panels, I had to set another hexagonal grid, and therefore, recalculate the diameter of circles. After, I rebuild the methodology of modeling from the new circles and hexagons, so that they could contain spikes and holes in a single NURBS surface per cell. Once the new methodology was solved, I implemented it in RhinoScript, creating an automated tool for modeling complex surfaces that form each cell of that panel.

As part of the script, forms are generated oriented for machining a Polystyrene foam panel in the three-axis milling machine, one side at a time.

Incremental Random Surface script

Once I get to introduce arrays and loops to work with points, I’m used to introduce nested arrays and loops to follow the constructive geometry logic of going to the next level: curves. And since is pretty obvious by itself, I go one more step to surfaces. The key concept to understand here is that a curve needs an array of points —which are arrays of numbers, so is an array of arrays— and a surface needs an array of curves —an array of arrays of arrays!

To set this level of nested arrays with loops, you have to nest the loop as well. The simplest example to understand this in RhinoScript is presented here. I’m using $x$ and $y$ as iteration variables, so the relation with the point arrays and the geometrical output is more clear. For the $z$ component, I’m using the pseudo random function (Rnd) in order to get a differentiated output without adding more lines of code.

A student once told me that it looks like a tsunami and remembering it I did this second image, with 21 iterations in $x$ and 51 in $y$ dimension. Notice that Rnd has no specified seed, so it’ll generate a different surface every time it runs. The script:

Call IncrementalRndSrf()
Sub IncrementalRndSrf()
    Dim Pts(20)
    Dim Crvs(50)
    Dim x, y
    
    For y = 0 To 50
        For x = 0 To 20
            Pts(x) = Array(x, y, Rnd*x)
        Next
        Crvs(y) = Rhino.AddCurve(Pts)
    Next
    Call Rhino.AddLoftSrf(Crvs)
End Sub

Tooling workshop at ELISAVA

On November, 2008, Affonso Orciuoli organized a ‘Tooling’ workshop: digital tools for design and fabrication in the Design, Image and Architecture postgraduate program at ELISAVA. I was part of the staff along with Maruan Halabi, Juan Pablo Quintero and Affonso. Maruan taught NURBS modeling with Rhino, Affonso and Juan Pablo worked on CAD/CAM strategies and fabrication with RhinoCAM and MEDIO’s machine, and I introduced PanelingTools and RhinoScript to bring more advanced tools to the range of strategies.

The first image is the panel of fabricated pieces from all projects. Secondly, project ‘Orchideae’, by Carlos Briceño, Leila Pablo González, Helena Bayona, Osian Abreu and Daniela Martínez; milled on a Krion board. The last one is a zoom on the piece from project ‘Bioro’, by Africa Arreola, Arturo Rodríguez, Gabriela Velarde, Daniel Gómez, Laia Feixas and Rita Rodrigues; based on the Simple Spiral script, milled on high density polyurethane resin. Original photos by MEDIO.

I have to recognize the effort of Juan Pablo and María León at MEDIO in finding material providers, working extra hours in their machine and publishing everything in the blog.

Simple Spiral script

In page 37 of David Rutten’s RhinoScript¹⁰¹ there’s a PointSpiral script as an example to understand point coordinates as arrays of three numbers, once you’ve got loops and an introduction to arrays. Since I usually have a short period of time to introduce this, I’m used to present a simplified example to address an introduction to both issues, with the argument that in this scripting strategies (constructive geometry methods, and further, generative design); points are, by far, the most representative use of arrays and one of the most common needs for incremental loops in those algorithms.

In the image is also interesting that, since we’re creating separated elements, it seems to be six spirals instead of just one, because distances from points in consecutive iterations are larger than distances from other spins of the spiral. The script goes:

Call SimpleSpiral()
Sub SimpleSpiral()
    Dim Pts(2)
    Dim i
    For i = 0 To 49
        Pts(0) = i * Sin(i)
        Pts(1) = i * Cos(i)
        Pts(2) = 0
        Call Rhino.AddPoint(Pts)
    Next
End Sub

RhinoScripting workshop at ELISAVA

On April, 2008, I taught, along with Carlos de la Barrera, a workshop named ‘Design by Scripting’ in the Design, Environment and Architecture postgraduate program at ELISAVA Escola de Disseny, Barcelona. We also had Ruther Paullo and Rita Patron as teaching assistants. The results where posted in g.d.e.s.

On a short period, we taught how to develop surfaces with potential to adapt to the environment. The first image of this post is from Fanny Flores, Arturo Leal, Aylin Suárez, Daniel Gómez and Eva Ferradás; an opened, pyramidal cell tissue. The second image is from Camilo Molano, Cesarina Medina, Delia Arce, Ivan Herrera, Mariam Sadedine; a system of hairy units on a closed surface, reusing my helicoidal curves growth algorithm.

Learning more scripting

I had the opportunity to be on an official RhinoScript workshop taught by David Rutten, as part of the events of a symposium on emergent architecture, at ESARQ – UIC, on April, 2008. I improved some skills and learned to work with recursion and meshes, among other things. David also gave us a demonstration of Grasshopper (then called Explicit History).

The image is from one challenge exercise I accomplished. From a given mesh and a base script, we had to do a proximity sensor that colors the mesh as another object gets closer to it.

Helicoidal entity

Experimenting with vector growth, by mistake I assigned the same final vector to the whole field and I got this interesting outcome. Then, the rendering colors where just for having some deep effect for a desktop image. That’s other positive side of experimenting in a trial-and-error way.