Grasshopper Workshop @ İBU

A newly established student club, “E3 Architecture and Design” is organizing a two-day workshop at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture between June 10-11, 2013. The Grasshopper Workshop will be the first one in the faculty. The event will be conducted at our computer lab. so the seats are limited to 28. I’ll try to explain the basic concepts of dataflow management in computer-aided design. Also, I plan to test a couple of problems apparent in computational geometry but not architecture yet. I am going to introduce several exercises to the students.

I introduced several definitions in the workshop. You can see one of them below:

We call this kind to pattern “Truchet Patterns”. I explained this system of generating patterns here. As you can see, I draw one of the cells and then used the Rectangular Array component to create the pattern. In the above example, the pattern is rather uniform. However, in a real truchet pattern, or truchet tiling, several rotational symmetries are used. In fact, it is the original quality of such patterns, having rotational symmetry.

In this short event, the students managed to get the foundations of Grasshopper and dataflow programming. However, I think it is not enough to completely finish it and use it in the design process with a single Grasshopper Workshop. The students must continue studying Grasshopper and get a slow but steady development path. I think that these short-term workshops are useful in introducing the languages. But it is then the job of the students to further study and learn every day. This is like learning a new instrument. Regular practicing is very important to remember and construct new knowledge on top of the old ones.