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We are a couple weeks into the course for the GAUD exhibition at Pratt. We have a good group and wil have the blog up soon with images from the “struggle.”

I will be teaching  visualizing[DATA] at pratt again this semester with Takuma. We will be posting the tutorials and other things we find on the class blog.

Finished up Visualizing[DATA] 2 weeks ago at Pratt. The class is a technical course and this semester I changed things a bit and gave the students freedom to explore their own interests. The goal of the course was for everyone to start with Flash and either input data into flash from another software or output to another software. There was a wide range of project personalities. Most of them friendly.

The selfish side of me likes the fact that technical classes in architecture school have become increasingly more specialized. At the end of the day I would rather teach something that is closer to what I am currently interested in or experimenting with, but students seem easily overwhelmed by these courses. Most students have almost real time access to the latest and greatest examples of design and experimentation produced by the computer. They are vary aware of the results, but not necessarily aware of the production. A lot of students seem to come to the class with a preconceived notion of what they want to do (which is usually the most complex thing they have seen to date) and then they hit a literal roadblock once they realize it will take time to learn the tools/techniques. This is an ongoing topic for discussion in our studio. The best answer we have so far is to treat the course as technique survey. This way the students can become aware of many techniques and decide for themselves which ones they might explore through their immediate career. Then we ask them to focus on something specific and keep it simple. From there any complexity becomes additive. Basically we ask them to grow a project.

The video above was produced for the class by Charles Kwan. This was a good example of one of the more successful projects because it is very focused and extremely simple. I think the success comes from the fact that it opens up interesting future possibilities. Because it is so simple and clear it can be easily understood and added to. The short description is that Charles made 4 light sensors and used processing to receive the light level read by each sensor and then read the four “digital” levels from flash. As each level increases it increases the size of the corresponding agents in his flash movie.

class link: Visualizing[DATA]

I just wanted to show this because it is the most important part of the fabrication system we used for the GAUD show @ Pratt and it is also the clearest/simplest. The clip detail doesn’t rely on any MEL scripting or expressions. It uses simple animation techniques to change the curves based on a custom attribute: “angle.” Each clip “angle” is adjusted by a script that queries a surface. The clips are then the detail that articulates the angles between panels. I also wanted to show it because it is designed to be extremely versatile and that versatility is a direct result of its simplicity. I see a lot of projects that rely on pseudo complex details. I say pseudo because they are mostly rely on form to define the “complexity” and that formal complexity usually limits the macro possibilities of a project.

The clip detail also contains all of the curves needed for fabrication. The curves are adjustable tooling for a laser cutter. So construction documents and shop drawings are bypassed since the end result can just be sent to the laser cutter.

Model: clip.mb

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http://www.gaudplusplus.com/

The podiums for the GAUD show are coming along. Each podium has 96 triangles and 256 clips.

Troy(on the left) is a structural engineer… licensed and everything. I asked him to generate a finite analysis of the surface to see how much it could hold. Instead he just put a heavy metal locker on it. It is all made of 2pli chipboard and is surprisingly strong, but I still think it is Photoshop, no one actually saw it since it was 3:00 am. The myth begins…

This is a podium prototype… check out the post below or follow the action live @ : GAUD++

These are shots of Rob and Troy building a full scale mock-up of a podium for the GAUD student work show this semester. Very exciting!!! The show is called GAUD++. I am teaching an independent study course at Pratt that will curate the show. All of the tooling for the system is automated through MEL… then the parts are laser cut. This prototype took approx. 4 hours to cut (the clips take a while). You can follow all of the non-stop action through the course blog GAUD++.

The guilty party is: robert_beach; sean_dugan; jason_mcgee; andrew_seskunas; troy_zezula

Interior of the prototype

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Visualizing[DATA] arch 523

This semester I will be teaching a course at Pratt called Visualizing[DATA]. The students will build simple interactive Flash models and record them over time. They will then harvest the field data from Flash and use it to build a model in Maya made of parametric tiles that will adjust to surface fluctuations. The main issues in the course will be transferring raw data between different software packages and express everything visually. Students will not be allowed to show code in their presentations. They will have to represent the process through visual diagrams so that a person that doesn’t speak “geek” will be able to understand the method an output. I will post a link to the website soon. There will also be some interesting MEL tools developed for the class that I will post later…..

Independent Study arch 698

I am involved in an experiment next semester. I am advising an independent study based on research I did at Columbia with Jeffrey Taras and Ken Tracy of 4pli. The idea now is that we will curate the end of the year show for the GAUD. We will using a variation of the system I worked on @ Columbia. The system takes a polygonal surface and generates all of the tooling for adjacency labels and the corresponding joints that articulate the angles between the panels. Last semester we modified it so it can be fabricated using a laser cutter. We will use this system to build the 3dimensional elements of the show. We will also be developing the graphics and hopefully publishing a documentary site. Like I said it is an experiment, the schedule for the gallery space is packed @ Pratt so we may just end up working on the system itself. Regardless we will build something interesting and I will post some of the final code and tool paths at the end of the semester.

Special Thanks to: Jason McGee and Troy Zezula for help last semester with the prototypes.

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SOFTlab just finished the gallery site for the GAUD @ Pratt (Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Design). There was a big rush to get all of the content in before the holidays for next year’s enrollment. We were able to get most of it in there.

The main idea behind the site is to show the most important parts of the school: work, faculty, and events. The navigation for the site was meant to be as flat as possible. You can see the titles of all the content for one year. The site also shows a 1 degree cross relationship between the different types of content(the events don’t have any real links to the other content yet). By using some of the same logic of the proximity experiments posted earlier, there is a visual and interactive cue to these relationships. When you click on a bar of content the site acts as a horizontal stack(like a library) and pulls out all other relative content for viewing. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Link: http://gaud.pratt.edu/

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