Discourses

Studio exercises are short-term and open-ended design activities that represent a constructivist learning approach by limiting design domains. They are student-centered, model and process-oriented educational tools. These qualities make studio exercises potential tools for integrating contemporary Digital Design thinking into architectural education. This research aims to reveal these potentials by defining an analytical perspective and logical connections between the pedagogical intentions of studio exercises and the theory of Digital Design. The first chapter of this research includes a definition of…

Under the dust of 10 years; revisiting my master’s thesis. This paper introduces research about the Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) tool which is based on the master thesis of Tuğrul Yazar from Yıldız Technical University (YTU) Faculty of Architecture Computational Design Graduate Program (BOM). The thesis is named “Expert Systems for Architectural Education: The Expert System of Sinan Mosques” and was completed in 2003 under the supervision of Dr. Birgül Çolakoğlu. YTU Department of Computer Engineering supported this research by…

This started as a pragmatist search of the term “Objectile”. I was curious about the real meaning of it, while the famous 1995 works of Bernard Cache were the thing I was looking for as images. I found two things about this word. One of them is the reproductions and online marketing of those famous carved panels (I was searching for), and while the second thing was a very interesting philosophical text from Levi Bryant, this blog (then became much more important…

Here is an interesting phrase from Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon’s famous article. It is “Why A Diagram (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words”; The phrase from the article My Thoughts on “A Diagram…” While perusing this text, I found myself curious about the correlation between “formal languages,” “algorithmic architecture,” “scripting,” and “problem-solving” and why we teach them together. The introduction to these subjects occurred during my enrollment in the Shape Grammars graduate course. Over the past decade, a fascinating re-connection…

This is my first try at DesignScript syntax. It is quite easy to understand and on-screen reference help seems to work well. It creates regular AutoCAD entities when you run. One of the most important concepts of this language is said to be a kind of associativity that updates objects when any parameter is changed while the script is running. However such associativity is not possible after the script has finished running. If you want to use the regular imperative…

Nowadays I plan to enter Rhinoscript, Python, and DesignScript back again. However, I can’t leave Grasshopper3D without mentioning the “cognitive shift” it pioneered in the design computing community. Here is a phrase from a famous special issue of “Computer” Journal, published in 1982 with Tilak Agerwala and Arvind’s editorials; Data flow languages form a subclass of the languages which are based primarily upon function application (i.e., applicative languages). By data flow language we mean any applicative language based entirely upon…

In 1982, it has been more than 15 years since the dataflow approach to algorithm designing are discussed in computer science. Computer journal publishes a special issue with the foreword of Tilak Agerwala; he says; …We have discussed two characteristics of the von Neumann model of computation: global updatable memory and a single program counter. It will become clear shortly that the data flow model has neither of these. First, the data flow model deals only with values and not with names of value containers…

When I was younger, among the branches of philosophy, I had studied a little logic and, among the subjects of mathematics, geometrical analysis and algebra, three arts or sciences which looked as if they ought to contribute something to my project. But in looking at them, I took care, because, so far as logic is concerned, its syllogisms and most of its other instructions serve to explain to others what one already knows or even, as in the art of…

Since last week, I’m very curious about circle packing. There are a couple of complete solutions on the internet. I’m still in the early steps of such a solution yet. A full circle packing means that it does not include any gaps and each circle is tangent to all possible neighbors. Sounds easy in Grasshopper but I couldn’t see any solution yet. There are some circle-packing attempts but they have gaps. Also, I don’t want to use an evolutionary solver…

Which keywords are the most popular, regarding contemporary architectural geometry? Above is the wordle.net analysis result for all 155k words of the famous book “Architectural Geometry” by H. Pottmann, A. Asperl, M. Hofer, and A. Kilian. Not many surprises though, this may be a starting point for research on today’s understanding of geometry in architectural design. You can click on the image to see the top 500 words mentioned in the book. It may be used to construct a conception…