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 the digital paradigm, and a geometric shift in the material…

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 some kind of an algorithm to accomplish this task. Therefore,…

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, which we’re sustaining at İstanbul Bilgi University Basic Design studios…

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 language, students are encouraged to generate and fabricate patterns. Below…

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, and willing to experience more of it. Coding exercises, readings,…

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 fast enough for a real-time interaction yet, because of the…

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 to put the circle and what its radius of it…

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 a circle around a point large enough. The size of…

Today’s tip is about two-dimensional curve-point calculations. It is very handy to use “closest point” components in Grasshopper. You can calculate distances and directions between curves, surfaces, and points. Then, place point objects in relation to the proximity of another object. However, there is no “farthest point” implemented yet. I tried to calculate the farthest point from a curve. First, I tried to translate the curve in a fashion that would result in the opposite of the closest point calculation….

It has been a while since I didn’t post any patterns. Here is a beautiful one from the iconic design studio of William Huff. Crossover Parquet Deformation is a single-axis, line-based deformation algorithm, constructed on a regular quadrangular hyperframe, designed by Richard Lane at the Basic Design studio of William Huff in 1963. It presents two different parquet deformation sequences linked together. Thus, the designer created a transition between the borders and inner cross-shapes gradually. This transition is visually smooth…