Below are some of the student works from the 4th-week exercise Bits and Pieces of this semester’s Basic Design studio. The gestalt notion of “figure-ground phenomenon” refers to the characteristic organization of perception into a figure that ‘stands out’ against an undifferentiated background. What is figural at any one moment depends on patterns of sensory stimulation. And on the momentary interests of the perceiver. Thus, the figure-ground relationship is an […]

While searching for a way to work with random points and growing populations, this idea appeared accidentally. I wasn’t trying to mimic the behavior of Karyokinesis of biological cells (in fact I’m in serious doubt about biomimicry in general). The trick is to use a timer + data recorder + a knob for the arbitrary user input. It starts to breed when you start the timer, but to change the […]

I learned this method from the open math resources website. I couldn’t help myself repeat it in Rhinoceros. It was quite fun to solve circle tangency problems in 2D, this is one of them: drawing the circle that passes three given points, not using ready-made commands but only geometric tools of the circle (compass) and ruler (line). Here is the sequence of it: First of all, we need to know […]

This was the initial example of image processing in our Parametric Modeling class. I saw this design on Maxthreads Architectural Design’s website (especially here). Hand-drawn and digital diagrams can also be digitized and used in order to describe certain parameters for design formation. Such algorithms would similarly use the Image Sampler Component of Grasshopper. In the algorithm below, image data is used to capture black pixels as attractors of a Voronoi subdivision. […]

Here is a simple explanation of the famous Euclidean Constructions: Why didn’t Euclid just measure things with a ruler and calculate lengths? For example, one of the basic constructions is bisecting a line (dividing it into two equal parts). Why not just measure it with a ruler and divide by two?One theory is the the Greeks could not easily do arithmetic. They had only whole numbers, no zero, and no […]

Grasshopper still surprises me. This definition draws a spiral by using a random component. It is obvious that the seed value of the random component has a relationship with an archimedean or a similar spiral. My intention was to create a definition to put a number of random points inside a circular area, not a rectangular one. While I grow the radius of a circle and get a t parameter […]

I at the Center is a multiple-axes vertex deformation based on a quadrangular hyperframe, designed by David Oleson at the studio of William Huff in 1964. Below, you see the original drawing and my Grasshopper animation based on a single-point attractor, creating the “I” wherever it is. It was a pleasure to read and repeat this deformation, which is a nice exercise in data tree operations and also one of the […]

This simple vb.net component controls the Rhino viewport background without a need to enter its options panel. It is used to change the viewport background color and grid visibility quickly within Grasshopper. Here is the definition file: [GHX: 0.9.0056]. In order to be able to return to default settings, I put a “default” toggle. Just click on it to “false” state, then the Rhino background color can be changed by the […]

Instead of searching for an iterated and rule-based variety, this method captures instances of spatial deformation by transforming the hyperframe. This liberates us from a classical understanding of pattern deformations that are enframed within regular polygons, mostly rectangles or hexagons. Grasshopper has a built-in component to study such variety. The spatial Deform component gets vectors as inputs and transforms any given geometric object according to it. This website has also […]

This is our eCAADe paper with Fulya Akipek, explaining our 2013 Workshop series called “Infections”. Contemporary trend of the computational design education is grounded on an integration of domains such as fabrication technologies, material studies, and generative techniques. This requires not only an intuitive handling on digital tools and methods, but also an experience on material and production constraints simultaneously. Patterning emphasizes a material shift in the generative side of […]

This is a small project of a facade study in Grasshopper, designed by KAF Architecture, and built in 2013 at Altunizade, İstanbul. KAF Architecture designed the facade with varying holes with an image of a forest. The image was supposed to generate the holes. At first, the office tried to do this manually, placing circular holes on the image in AutoCAD. However, after several hours, they thought that they needed […]

This paper presents the beginnings of my journey into architectural education, presented at Yıldız Technical University Architectural Education Symposium 2007, together with YTU/CADU staff; Ela Çil, Birgül Çolakoğlu, Meral Erdoğan, Fulya Akipek, Oya Pakdil, and Şebnem Yalınay. It includes different exercises from various studio instructors,  all motivated by contemporary computational design theory. This was one of the milestones in the first year of education of a computation-based studio in Turkey, […]

This was my first parametric patterning study we conducted together with Birgül Çolakoğlu at Yıldız Technical University in 2008. It was based on the pattern exercises we’ve experienced with BOT Graduate Students as a preliminary study within a Computational Design Studio. Later, the CNC fabrications were exhibited at İstanbul Bilgi University Digital Design Symposium. The exercise was about analyzing and reconstructing regular İslamic Patterns via MaxScript. After fundamental instructions about the […]

ARCH 362 COURSE BRIEF (2013) Design computing reflects a focal shift from the singular construction of objects into the relational nature of revealing diversity. Algorithms are mainstream interfaces for the explication of geometric relationships, extending techniques required for such revealing. This course introduces some ways of managing diversity while reasoning about sequential and concurrent; absolute and relational; ordered and chaotic. Students are expected to be familiar with fundamentals of Rhino3D, […]

Fracture is a simple effect experiment on Grasshopper. Although it is not the best tool for an interactive media installation regarding its performance, I tried to use it as a simple sketching tool for concept development. It is the sketch of a material system we are working on nowadays for an Exhibition. The initial diagram of Grasshopper includes a nested Voronoi subdivision broken by moving attractor points. It is not […]

Again, I continue with some simple solutions for Grasshopper. The surface split component gives all possible surfaces sliced with given curves. And it creates “invalid” curves with at least one open edge. I used this to perceive the closed regions within a given complex curve set. Just put the “Clean” component to erase the outer invalid surfaces and there remain the closed ones. However this time the question was where […]

This is a simple trick that shows the utilization of the “surface split” component in Grasshopper. It is used for detecting the inner regions of any given two-dimensional linework. Thus, it resembles the hatch boundary detection of AutoCAD and similar software. There is no built-in hatch component in Grasshopper. But maybe you can use this as a starting point if you want to develop it. The definition starts with drawing […]