#grasshopper

How much work we did last year for first-year architectural education! The tensile fabric study we carried out using Grasshopper Kangaroo in “Design Computing”, a first-year course I coordinated alongside my colleague Serkan Uysal, served as a baseline for the material research addressed in the Basic Design studio at that time. Such geometric optimizations in Kangaroo are no longer surprising or novel to anyone. However, experiencing these tools and possibilities in architectural education in the very first year offers a…

The development of geometry began by measuring the world as discrete objects. Moving beyond measuring nature, it evolved into reasoning, calculation, and mathematics. Platonic solids were one of the most elegant and beautiful ideas reached by geometry. Pondering why there are only five of them was a tribute to collective human intelligence. Earlier in this blog, we modeled polyhedra, like the Platonic solids, using geometric construction methods. This process was like solving a puzzle. To construct a point whose distances…

While trying to program the curves produced by Spirograph toys in Grasshopper, I took a slightly different path. The topic eventually led to a broader heading: harmonic motion, and from there, to the Fourier Series we looked at previously. This simple Python code models Fourier Synthesis, driven by circles of different radii in a very straightforward way. The Python component sets up a loop that calculates the effect of each circle to the x and y values, individually. In this…

This is the last of the site analysis tools we previously used in the midterm project of first-year architecture education. As you may recall, we previously introduced a tool that generates topographies based on specific parameters. Afterward, we examined two tools that perform slope and flow analyses on these topographies. Today, we are presenting a tool that analyzes curvature. This topic actually constitutes one of the interesting intersection points between architectural design and differential geometry. Curvature is not something architects…

This project randomly stole an entire evening of mine. I didn’t know what the cantellation operation was. After doing some research, I realized it mirrors the process of the dual operation we had previously performed with polyhedra. It turns out to be the process of turning edges into new faces. I started looking for ways to do this in Grasshopper without using ready-made add-ons that include this and similar operations. As always, I had to solve many interesting geometry and…

For a research project with Avşar Gürpınar in 2024, we studied lace patterns. During this process, I had the opportunity to try out two Grasshopper plugins: Parakeet and Clipper. When combined, they allow you to obtain laser-cutting patterns. Parakeet is a very good plugin that generates tessellations. This was something I always dreamed of developing back in my youth. 2-Uniform Tiling In this design, I used the Parakeet component named 2-Uniform Tiling. In geometry and tiling theory, a 2-uniform tiling…

I’d like to write down an interesting problem here. I remembered this while thinking about this post. It represents one of my favorite, simple pieces of reasoning. I frequently find myself needing to sort a number of points around a center in Grasshopper. Don’t ask why. I realized I’ve been using three different methods to achieve this. The first one that comes to mind is using the Vector Angle component, naturally. All we have to do is supply a plane…

Hot-wire cutting (HWC) is a cost-effective subtractive fabrication technique used across many industries. The basic idea of HWC is to cut a block of material by melting it with a resistance-heated wire under tension. It is effective for materials with low melting temperatures, such as expanded polystyrene (EPS) and extruded polystyrene (XPS). Generally, HWC is associated with mold production in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries. Robotic hot-wire cutting (RHWC) is a subtopic of HWC. In a standard RHWC…

We previously looked at the terrain generator script we used in midterm projects with first-year architecture students over here. Later on, we added a few analysis modules to this tool. You might remember the slope analysis tool from this link. Today’s topic is another type of analysis: flow. The idea for this code wasn’t actually mine; I developed it by looking at an existing script based on Serkan Uysal’s suggestion. Unfortunately, I don’t know who originally wrote it. Keeping track…

The question of how form emerges in architecture has always been one of the most fundamental debate topics of computational design. When I was a graduate student, we used to examine how abstract language structures made of words and rules turned into spatial and geometric systems. In this post, starting from the reflection of linguistic theories on architecture, we will talk about the logic of discrete aggregation that we study in the first year Design Computing courses. At the same…