This is my second attempt on getting into non-euclidean representations of space. Althouth it seems easy at first sight, this represents a close point of theory between mathematics and contemporary computational design geometry. As always, architects tend to use mathematical terms such as “non-euclidean geometries” but as far as I saw, most of them have no idea about what it is. So, I’m trying to learn and understand this connection by experiencing small parts of it, sailing at the edges…

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,…

This is my first attempt at representing a non-euclidean space. There are several representations of a non-euclidean space in euclidean means such as Beltrami-Klein or Klein, Poincare, Poincare half-plane, and Weierstrass. Here, I tried to understand Poincare’s approach. Random straight lines are drawn on a hypothetical hyperbolic space using a simulation of Poincare’s famous disk representation. Although there is a precise description of the disk and its construction, I used a ready-made arc component of Grasshopper3d, showing start and end points along…

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….

Using SPM Vector Components developed by two talented people, Daniel Hambleton and Chris Walsh (website here), I’ve studied ways of displaying dynamic diagrams of form. I’ve modified an example file and found myself in a surprising formal exploration. It’s like watching the clouds, giving them meaning like a sheep, a flower, a baby… This needs SPM tools to be installed first and includes a timer component. To run the simulation, double-click on the lower toggle (set it to false) and run the timer…

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!…

I’ve worked a little more about the Solar Position definition I’ve started here. The definition uses Danel da Rocha’s beautiful solar position script and utilizes it with other components. It creates visual output for any given surface, divided into quads (with side faces of course) and coloring according to their orientation to the sun. This time I added an occlusion part to calculate the surface’s own shadow. Now, the solar calculation takes surfaces as obstacles and dispatches the occluded faces…

I recently discovered Wordle, a visualization tool for websites. I’m very curious about the social network of design computing community. Trying to understand the trends, how the knowledge is spreading, and the role of different actors on this developing field of architectural design. First of all, I analyzed designcoding.net with all words within 103 posts until today (Click on the image for full size). Wordle can be visited by clicking here. Below is the grasshopper3d.com’s wordle result. I suspect it’s rss…

Here are several passages from Shamos’s dissertation thesis, where he is studying the history of geometry from the perspective of a computer scientist. This topic always fascinated me. However, this is a good reading for the algorithmic roots of geometry. …Egyptian and Greek geometry were masterpieces of applied mathematics. It is well established that the original motivation for tackling geometric problems was the need to tax lands accurately and fairly and to erect buildings (Eves, 72)… Euclid’s chief contribution to…