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 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!
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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.
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.
After three days of lectures and exercises, Gonçalo Castro Henriques and I focused the workshop Complex Geometry and Parametric Design with Grasshopper on the production of projects for a covering at the patio of the School of Architecture. The requirements were to generate complex skins or structures just with developable components, so that they would be buildable with 2D CNC technology.
We had the honor of presenting the workshop projects to an audience of prominent academics and professionals. Here are some images of the projects:
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 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.
