Studios

The Truncated Icosahedron (5,6,6) is an Archimedean Solid we often recognize as the iconic soccer ball. This geometric structure, also affectionately known as the “Buckyball” in honor of the visionary architect Buckminster Fuller, has gained significant popularity and recognition both within the realms of mathematics and everyday life. It is composed of twelve regular pentagons and twenty regular hexagons. This symmetrical nature makes it an interesting object of study in geometry and various fields. This is a short Rhinoceros tutorial…

İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture Basic Design II Spring 2012 undergraduate studio* group 6 includes both a geometric exploration and material research. They examined various formal alternatives, using wooden sticks and plastic tie-wrap connectors. After these experiments, they constructed a 1:1 material system spanning 4 meters in length and 2 meters in height, using 2.5km of wooden sticks and 18.000 tie wraps. This was an enormous effort to create such a spanning structure with small sticks. *Students: Aylin Özel,…

İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture Basic Design II Spring 2012 undergraduate studio* group 8’s project is a metal surface construction. Group of first year design students were capable of designing, modeling, fabricating and assembling the structure with a good precision. After physical prototypes of the proposed spanning structure, they further experimented in rhinoceros and sent faces to plasma cutting and bending process. Finally, they assembled the faces with nails at the site. This was one of the good explorations…

Below is the final project of group 3 at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture Basic Design II Spring 2012 undergraduate studio*. First photo shows students’ efforts on generating  formal variations. They studied much on this folding components and attaching them together to create surfaces. Their final surface spans nearly 2.5 meters in height. Forex is used as main material and they nailed them from faces.  The different sizes, shapes and orientations of the faces somehow create stasis within gaps….

This is the final project of group 2 at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture Basic Design II Spring 2012 undergraduate studio*. 1:1 material system is constructed by two layers of tesselfations, triangular and hexagonal. They studied much for the connection detail and elaborated the structure to maintain stasis within a dynamic pose. They have used a Grasshopper definition (described here) to label and measure all of 800 rods into Excel. Very hard work, intellectually and physically has finished. Congratulations!…

Not all of them, but when you get the idea, you’ll see there are lots of different alternatives for creating Fuller’s famous Geodesic Domes (Although in fact, he is not the inventor of it). I was playing with Platonic Solids in Rhino and realized that the “Pull” command is very useful in subdividing objects. I modeled this in Rhino 4. First, take a regular Icosahedron and divide it. Because, this is the simplest way for modeling a Geodesic sphere, by…

The tetrahedron is a popular platonic solid for designers. We’ve explained how to draw them using equilateral triangles here before. Recently I’ve found (sorry, lost the web address) a much quicker way of modeling a Tetrahedron using a cube. It’s very simple, just connecting the three opposite corners of the cube automatically makes them equal, resulting in the four equal faces. Of course this time you’ll have to calculate the actual edge length, but if you use the “box diagonal”…

Digging out with Grasshopper, Rhinoscript, and Paneling Tools, everything seems to be more and more automated and fast. However my colleagues Mete, Benay and Elif reminded me that, we can always do much with those high-end architectural geometry tools, but we still have to understand and follow the roots, probably best described by the “manual ways”. Sometimes using these methods would be much more intuitive as they are SLOW enough for designers to think about what is going on there……

Today, we’ve finished first phase, the introduction to dataflow management in visual programming environments; and conducted “well defined” part of the mid-term examination. First two questions were designed to test technical skills of data matching, geometric evaluation. First one was a simple algorithm that calculates the area of ANY triangle in real-time. Tricky part of this problem was to research and find ways of calculating area and implementing it in Grasshopper. Most obvious formula, “a x h / 2” is…

[It seems simple at first sight, but creating a window definition in Revit requires a lot more time than I expected. A freelance job led me to create this parametric object, when I saw the architect’s sketch of all window types of the building side by side. There was a clear connection between all of them, leading me to define a single window object. Of course I’m not happy with the overall look of the window, those sills; but, what…