#digital-design

Here is an interesting phrase from Jill Larkin and Herbert Simon’s famous article. It is “Why A Diagram (Sometimes) Worth Ten Thousand Words”; The phrase from the article My Thoughts on “A Diagram…” While perusing this text, I found myself curious about the correlation between “formal languages,” “algorithmic architecture,” “scripting,” and “problem-solving” and why we teach them together. The introduction to these subjects occurred during my enrollment in the Shape Grammars graduate course. Over the past decade, a fascinating re-connection…

Which keywords are the most popular, regarding contemporary architectural geometry? Above is the wordle.net analysis result for all 155k words of the famous book “Architectural Geometry” by H. Pottmann, A. Asperl, M. Hofer, and A. Kilian. Not many surprises though, this may be a starting point for research on today’s understanding of geometry in architectural design. You can click on the image to see the top 500 words mentioned in the book. It may be used to construct a conception…

Here is the preface of the famous book “Architectural Geometry”. It simply encourages me to learn new things every day even sometimes it seems to become impossible. Geometry lies at the core of the architectural design process. It is omnipresent, from the initial form-finding stages to the actual construction. Modern constructive geometry provides a variety of tools for the efficient design, analysis, and manufacture of complex shapes. This results in new challenges for architecture. However, the architectural application also poses…

Joseph Bergin‘s pedagogical patterns for computer science education returned my attention to teaching methods I’ve searching for almost five years. Here is a phrase from a paper submitted to pedagogical pattern language project: Most educators and trainers are not taught how to teach. Rather, they often find themselves teaching by accident. Typically, a person with a skill that is in demand, such as a particular programming language, will be asked to teach it. People assume that if the person is good in this…

Here is an interesting six-year-old quote from Rivka Oxman, telling us about a potential class of designers. The particular character, type, class or whatever we call could be more sophisticated people than we imagine today. It tells me that, advances in design computing does make high-end techniques available for large communities, and re-define basics of architectural geometry for everyone in digital age, but always there seem to remain a small group of avant-garde. If Ms. Oxman is right, then the…

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…

Searching for a meaning to today’s popular design methods and concepts we are all going after. Most of the abstract problems, today described within architectural domains, are very parallel to another field defined by M. Ian Shamos in 1978. Here is the introduction paragraph of his PhD thesis; Geometry is a subject that has captured the imagination of Man for at least 2500 years. It is at the very foundation of Art, Architecture, and Mathematics, and plays a central role…

Whenever we try to define something suitable for our design intentions, it became somehow closely related to the design tool. The contemporary theory of computational design (or design computing) has many definitions. In this website, we look at that from the perspective of method and its theory underneath, not the tools; however, it finally comes to a point that we -again- start to talk about “tools”. Whatever, the purpose is “the process” or the associative geometries, even a diagram is…

In recent years, computational approaches in architecture started to change the scope of the architect’s work. He/she is not any more a passive tool user instead, became a casual tool developer. Conventional CAD systems that focus on geometric representation of a designed artifact, are transforming into systems in which the design is represented as a parametric process. By increasing utilization of these systems in architectural design process, parametric modeling is integrated not only as a new medium of design representation, but also as a design method. Designing the design implies…

Information Age has been transforming architecture, provoking its theoretical and methodological foundations. We might call this as a paradigm shift or not; it’s obvious that contemporary research fields and built practices lead architectural design into a certain revolution. Mainstream schools of design education are becoming more involved in this revolution, with a common purpose; the need to construct a logical connection between contemporary design theories utilizing methods called popularly as “digital architecture”, and all aspects and agents of a design…