sac-workshop-2014

Computational design workshop @ Städelschule Frankfurt, Dec 2014

About

This workshop was run with Year 2 students of the architecture class @ SAC and served both as intensive treatment/introduction of general intermediate level programming techniques and computational methods for topics related to architectural design practice. The examples in this repository were all developed from scratch as group during the workshop, but heavily rely on functionality provided by toxiclibs (and of course Processing).

Requirements

• SourceTree
• Source code for this repo

Note: We used a build of the current master branch of the toxiclibs repo. Some examples might not work with earlier versions (i.e. the last official release v0020).

Day 1 - Iterative processes

• Iterative processes / feedback functions
• Discussion of various looping constructs
• Discrete time vs. real time
• Basic RGB color theory
• Pixel manipulations
• Cross-domain parameter mapping

Source code

Strange Attractors (DeJong)

DeJong1	DeJong2

References

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor
• http://paulbourke.net/fractals/peterdejong/

Day 2

• 2D/3D vector algebra / geometry / geometry data types
• Introduction to OOP
• Introduction to toxiclibs verlet physics
• Clustering
• Probabilistic choice selection
• Mesh structures
• Mesh export

Source code

City clusters

Day 3

• Introduction to agents
• Mesh generation/conversion from 2D/3D entities
• In-depth discussion of mesh structures
• Mesh subdivision strategies
• Recursion
• Rendering

Source code

Di-pole fieldline agents

Sequential / recursive subdivisions

Day 4

• Mesh construction using point strands/lists
• Recursive application of Parallel-transport frames (sweep meshes)
• Define 2D subdivision schemes
• In-depth discussion of normal vectors
• 3D mesh export from 2D line strips
• More complex hybrid-2D/3D agent system based on contour finding
• Systematic exploration of parametric design/search spaces

Source code

From points to curves to meshes

2D Subdivions

Terrain Agents

scan dist	speed 0.5 - 2	speed 1 - 3	speed 1 - 4	speed 2 - 5
10
20
40

Day 5

• Working with external data sets
• CSV parsing
• Data structures: HashMaps, Sets
• Aggration functions
• Data analysis: finding/defining connections/relations
• Data visualization (chord graph)

Source code

Chord graph visualization

License

With exception of the PTFTest example, all other examples are published under the LGPLv3 license. A copy of the license text is also supplied within the repository.

PTFTest demo licensed under Apache Software License 2.0.

All non-code assets are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

© 2014 Karsten Schmidt