Co-de-iT joins the Master in Sustainable Architecture at IED Turin

Co-de-iT joins the ‘IED Turin – Master in Sustainable Architecture‘ to develop a series of courses and other activities on the topic of Innovation, Environment and Urban Data driven Design along the entire Master Program.

The collaboration is aimed to develop activities and organize specific classes to explore the tools and processes of innovative design technologies (such as parametric and computational design, data driven design, data mining). Students will learn to find, generate and manage environmental and urban data to be applied in a parametric design strategy in order to inform an aware design process. The results will represent a consistent body of work for an informed building design.

IED + Co-de-iT workshop series include:

Module 1: Introduction to parametric design with Grasshopper

[.] Brief
The visual programming interface, Grasshopper, has extended Rhino into a powerful parametric design tool. It enables architects and designers the ability to translate design thinking into a parametric logic that maintains associative links between geometry. It is an extremely fast and intuitive way of creating flexible and parametric models.

The workshop will be an introduction to parametric design. It aims to promote digital technologies to support the design and manufacture providing participants the fundamentals of parametric and generative modeling through Grasshopper.

The workshop goal is to highlight, managing and develop the relation between information and the geometry implicit in the use of parametric tools. The modeling of parametric geometries (NURBS and Mesh) in fact requires the ability to set and manipulate data structures – information – in order to define the entire process of design that can go from design to production.

Students will learn how to build and develop parametric data structures (from basic simple lists to complex data trees) to inform their data-driven geometry/envelopes, to create populations of responsive models and how to extract and use relevant informations from such models for construction processes.

[.] Technical Learning:

Participants are expected to learn how to compose, edit, and generate algorithms definitions using Grasshopper. They will also be assisted to prepare their own definitions that reflect their own design criterion in the development of their project. The workshop technical tutorials will include:

Introduction to Grasshopper;
Interfaces, canvas, navigation;
Components: structures, colors, menu, wires;
Data flow basics: geometry types, data types;
Geometry creation: points, planes and vectors, curves;
Data flow intermediate: lists management: domain, interval, range, serie;
Pre-rationalization: constraints, range definition, domain mapping, modulation;
Surfaces;Data flow intermediate: conditional operations, data visualization and control (text tags, panel);
Data flow advanced: data tree & pathmapping
Geometry instantiation (component to proliferation environment);
Attractor logics (one and multiple points, curves);
Informing geometries: colors & tagging
Surface subdivision & component design methods
Responsive morphologies
Mesh & subdivision tools
Coloring mesh and mesh plugins

Module 2: Data driven strategies for environmental design

[.] Brief
The workshop will introduce the students to parametric design techniques as a new medium for architectural design. The workshop aims to explore context-specific design and patterns based on a feedback loop and negotiations between the relevant forces and the participant’s aesthetic sensibility and to explore new design possibilities towards performance-oriented design.

The workshop will teach at managing and develop the relation between information and geometry working on condition-specific envelope systems. Surface discretization (paneling), driving geometry through information (whether coming from environmental analysis or any kind of database), extracting and managing informations for construction processes all require an understanding of data structures in order to build seamless design-to-construction pipelines.

Through visual scripting in Grasshopper (Generative modeling plug-in for Rhinoceros) participants will learn how to build and develop parametric data structures (from basic simple lists to complex data trees), data-driven responsive geometry and envelopes and how to extract relevant informations from such models for construction processes. Students will also develop a personal envelope project and its full design-to-construction pipeline.

[.] Technical Learning

Lists & Data Tree: management, manipulation, visualization
Geometry generation from data stream
Base exercises (Box morph, Image sampler, Floor sections, Attractor field, Multisection Pipe, Paneling)
Data-reactive component – data-reactive tessellation on NURBS surface. Data coming from environmental analysis or spreadsheet table
Data extraction from previous tessellation, visualization and storage in spreadsheets.
Geometry optimization for construction
Data coming from environmental analysis or spreadsheet table
Analysis of specific site environmental data to develop a data set and generate an architectural envelop with responsive features driven by the data-set conditions.

[.] Info

More info about the Master program at: http://iedtorinosmart.com/