Parametric Wall Revisited

Here is the winning team of this year’s mid-term jury competition in the first-year Basic Design studio at İstanbul Bilgi University. The challenge they undertook was called “Void by Subtraction.” Initially, the students engaged in a series of short-term exercises exploring solid and void relationships. Alongside the studio sessions, they honed their digital modeling skills through Architectural Geometry courses. Their task was to create a contoured structure within a restricted 8m3 volume. Through various iterations using clay and foamboard prototypes,…

Design Computing classes conducted a “voluntary” assignment; a “contouring” fabrication, that outputs physical prototypes of the previous parametric wall assignment. They worked very well with the corrugated cardboard in fact and extended the simple contouring exercise in Rhinoceros into a design study of patterning and transparency. It seems that corrugated cardboard is a perfect material to study the shift from digital to the material. Below are some of the student works that study various angles of contouring on different seamless surface…

The Cut & Fold & Craft exercise is the mid-term project for last year’s Computation-based Basic Design Studio at İstanbul Bilgi University Faculty of Architecture. I really enjoyed the technique called Kirigami. Most of the projects are not flat-foldable but they are all cut from a single sheet of paper. This technique seemed a little bit limiting at the beginning, but the students managed to design very interesting compositions in the end. Below are some of the student works. I…

Here is another computation-based Basic Design II final project. It is made of paper tubes, joined angular by nuts and bolts in order to give the desired form. This group had serious problems with project development and exploration, but anyway they managed to finish this inspirational prototype. *Students: Abdullah Selim Buldu, Ecem Aksoy, Lachyn Tuliyeva, Neda Khorshidi, Selenay Geyik, Sevgi Yücel

This was a couple of weeks ago, together with my six-year-old son Mete, we decided to make a “ball” out of old memory cards. I was curious about a subdivision method, using only planar quadrilaterals to construct a sphere (named Sixty Square Sphere. There are a couple of models on www. Of course look much better than mine:=). However, my son was expecting a “ball” to play. Then, both of our expectations have been partially met, I think. You see…