​The more I work with and study polyhedra, the more I realize how rare and special they are. They represent both the abstract and universal rules of geometry and space. ​I can understand their symmetries, faces, vertices, and most importantly, their mathematical necessities. Yet, when looking at a solid, sometimes a specific form strikes me as more attractive than the others. Moreover, I cannot explain this simply by saying, “It has more symmetry” or “Its proportions are better.” For me,…

I want to introduce a concept I came across the other day, one I had never heard of before, along with a few fantastic websites. The Campanus Sphere is essentially a rather crude spherical representation, the kind I’m used to seeing in (very old) computer games, and it also makes a nice nod to 80s disco culture. I also recall that in many older CAD software packages, spheres and sphere-related Mesh objects were represented as polyhedra using this method. However,…

While digging through my trash archives, I found this video from three years ago. Instead of exploring things with Grasshopper, I jumped into a bit of naive digital art. The Fibonacci Sphere algorithm was very popular in those days. I used the SubD components, which were new at the time. It was around the same period as the one right over there. I tried to make something scary again, but to be honest, there is also quite a depressive mood…

Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 work, Leviathan, was written in Paris, where he had fled the English Civil War because of his royalist leanings. In this work, Hobbes defines Leviathan as a strong state authority. To do so, he is compelled to develop certain definitions concerning human and societal nature. In this week’s Digital Culture Readings class, we focused on the fifth chapter of Leviathan, titled “Of Reason, and Science.” While eagerly awaiting my students’ papers, I present my own response paper…

Ever since I restructured designcoding, I’m still sorting through the trash folder. All 580 posts published on the blog have been reviewed, and their files have been uploaded as open source. The mysterious trash folder, where I couldn’t even tell where things belonged, is shrinking fast. While checking this folder yesterday, I found a video. This is probably a simple tutorial I prepared about 10 years ago for the parametric modeling elective course (probably related to this 2012 post). The…

Have you ever thought about making a damped pendulum in Grasshopper? I have no idea why, but I did. I just decided to transfer a Python snippet I found online into a Grasshopper definition. Here, the Initial Angle (Radians) Number slider sets the initial angle to any value from 0 to Pi. The letter G represents the acceleration due to gravity (approximately 9.81 m/s2). This is the primary force pulling the pendulum downward. As you know, pendulums wouldn’t swing without…

The mandatory course Readings on Digital Culture in the Graduate Program in Architectural Design at Istanbul Bilgi University began with the introductory chapter of Charlie Gere’s Digital Culture. We will write a response paper every week. I have completed my response to the first reading. The reading begins with the parallel development of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism. It then follows this history up to the emergence of today’s computers. It looks at how money gradually became a more abstract…

Over the past few months, I bought a cheap and affordable 3D printer, and I am quite satisfied with it. The Creality Hi model printer has advanced features and its quality is not bad at all. Compared to the Ultimaker printers we used in the past, technology has naturally evolved over the years, and certain processes have become much easier. With this occasion, I wanted to share the literature review I conducted for a project. Maybe it will be useful…

How much work we did last year for first-year architectural education! The tensile fabric study we carried out using Grasshopper Kangaroo in “Design Computing”, a first-year course I coordinated alongside my colleague Serkan Uysal, served as a baseline for the material research addressed in the Basic Design studio at that time. Such geometric optimizations in Kangaroo are no longer surprising or novel to anyone. However, experiencing these tools and possibilities in architectural education in the very first year offers a…

Let’s take a closer look at the midterm jury assignment for our “Field & Matter”- themed Computation-based Basic Design 2 studio, which I conducted last year alongside Serkan Uysal, İpek Kuran, and Sinan Logie. I shared the studio’s final project, Earthbound, in a previous post. In this post, we will focus on our process-oriented midterm project named Spacebound. Topography as a Data Field In this first major phase of the “Field & Matter” studio, we examined how moving and stationary…