Tensile Fabric with Kangaroo
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 profoundly different pedagogical approach.
The field of computational design is expanding and spreading rapidly. These technologies, which once allowed for specialization in a niche area, are now structured in a way that spreads, and has to spread (?) into general education. The most critical issue here seems to be instructor training. Although today it is possible to encounter a “computational design expert” architect anywhere and in any environment, the proportion of individuals who can truly cope with deep expertise and provide proper education is gradually decreasing. Even the status of whether PhD researchers in this field can step outside their niche dissertation topics to teach in mainstream architectural education has many question marks (at least within my circle).
This exercise optimizes a mesh surface, anchored by two points and a curve, by stretching it for a classic tensile fabric design. You can access the files for this exercise below, which teaches Kangaroo’s goal objects structure in a nice and effective way.
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