AA High-Low Design Workshop São Paulo

From July 11 to 21, 2011, it'll be next AA Visiting School São Paulo titled: High-Low Design Workshop at Centro Cultural FIESP. Here's the release:

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.

Source: saopaulo.aaschool.ac.uk

Applications: AA School - Visiting School Application

On-going Adventure

Is that Zaha? No, is that Ushida Findlay? No, is the on-going project of a workshop that we, at Atelier UM+D, are doing with a bunch of architecture students here in Curitiba.

Is the most complex structure I've work with so far... and is going to be build! (when we solve the assemblage :)

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!

Toolbox Torino project submission on Parametricismo

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.

Some Update Notes

AA_NAI_SP_WORKSHOP by Kim Azevedo on Facebook

I wish I had more time to post some interesting things happening here.

The AA – NAi Design Workshop São Paulo was incredible. The event was way too intense to reserve some time to post something, and I didn’t have a decent camera to record it anyways… I now have 60+ more friends in Facebook and Twitter, and they have share a lot of pictures (seriously, various GB!), too much to choose from. Fortunately, there are other media that had cover it:

• TV Brasil - Arquitetos criam peças recicláveis para espaços públicos 
• ZOOblog - AA NAi Design Workshop São Paulo - P1 - P2 - P3 - P4 - P5 
• Facebook | Photos of AA - NAi Design Workshop São Paulo 

I just begun to collaborate with Atelier UM, a recently recognized, Curitiba based architecture & design office. I’m looking forward to produce very interesting things with them.

I’m also working on the proposal of various workshops, most of them for the next year. And of course, I’m also doing a lot of other things, some of them will worth posting them. But one thing I should be doing is my thesis…

Osseous Truss Pavilion

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.

Launching Parametricismo

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…

Gonzalo Vélez Jahn, premio Francisco De Venanzi

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!