Drawing for Designers 2: Human Presence and Appearance in Natural and Built Environment
The course is intended as a creative drawing laboratory for designers, an expressive and playful supplement to computer-based labor.
The aim of the class is to learn how to depict and express the presence and appearance of people in natural and built environments.
This class objective will be achieved through three projects:
First: focusing on people’s active presence in the landscape.
Second: on people in a populated urban environment.
Third: on a person or two people acting or interacting in a specific spatial and social situation.
Each of the assigned projects will be realized in a different, specifically selected technique:
– The first project will use a technique called a subtractive tone.
– The second one will use a technique of a multiple lines/marks.
– The last one will use an images projection.
The course will help to master techniques in hand drawing, refine sensitivity to all details of what one sees, and develop capacity to articulate them in a visually convincing and evocative form.
The class projects will include work in outdoor and indoor situations and places, as well as drawings of life models. In the process of drawing, students will focus on the world of lines, textures, shapes, light, shade, and values. We will use various tools, materials and artistic techniques including pencils, vine charcoal, graphite, etc.
In addition to the completion of three large drawing projects a special short assignment will be given at the beginning of each class session.
Working on projects will be supplemented by the field trips, presentations, and discussions of relevant examples from art history and contemporary art. Guest artists will be invited as reviewers for the presentations and exhibition of the final project.
No prerequisites are required.
Responsive Environments
The course introduces students to the tools and design methods for creating responsive environments and technologically driven experiences in the built environment. By putting the human experience at the center and forefront, from the immediate body scale to the larger environment, encompassing buildings and the urban spaces, the course examines new and emerging models and technologies for the design of innovative architectural human interfaces and technologically augmented physical environments.
The class addresses fundamental questions including: What are new and emergent ways of understanding the digital and physical environments? How can we create responsive and interactive experiences that augment the person’s experience of the physical space? What are the consequences of creating technologically augmented environments? What are the psychological, social, and environmental implications of creating such hybrids? And what are the criteria to measure successful responsive environments?
These questions of analyzing, understanding and designing responsive environments will be tackled through both class discussions and also hands-on designing and prototyping of interactive, responsive installations. Readings and discussions will explore current and historical examples, theories of phenomenology, psychogeography, multisensory experience of architecture, body-centricity, proxemics, interaction design, installation design, and human-machine interface. Informed by this discourse, the first part of the course will engage students in measuring and quantifying the ephemeral and invisible qualities of space and human experience of space. This will form the foundation for students to design spatial and interactive interventions at various scales, ranging from wearables, interactive objects, to large-scale architectural installations. In the process, students will become familiarized with technologies that can change and augment our physical environment such as biometric sensors, electronics, processing, projections, and others.
The course will culminate with an exhibition of the students’ responsive and interactive installations of varied scales using the tools and methods discussed in class. The course will take advantage of the resources and the ongoing research at the Responsive Environments and Artifacts Lab.
No specific prerequisites are needed. Students from any background and concentration are encouraged to apply to the lottery.
Mediums Domain students will be priotiized in the MDes Advanced Course Selection.
Digital Media: Algorithmic Problems: Grasshopper as Medium
Grasshopper has become the design tech world’s second favorite idiom — after Python anyway. Incidentally, it has also become the design tech world’s answer to ‘broken English’: a seemingly easy, go-to language spoken effectively by billions of people, albeit with scant regard for its intrinsic depth, rigor, or idiosyncrasies.
Its relative ease of use and commensurate popularity have only exacerbated this paradox. The more people adopt it, the less it is understood. The course will challenge this paradox and explore Grasshopper’s algorithmic complexity on its own merit.
Focusing on this most ubiquitous of media may seem like an odd choice at first. Since nearly everyone uses it in some form, Grasshopper is usually taken for granted. In practice, however, while the low bar of entry and ease with which it delivers basic results have led to its widespread adoption as the lingua franca of design and computation, Grasshopper has become the victim of its own success. As the scripting language of choice in fields as disparate as architecture, thermal analysis, robotics, fashion design, and machine learning, Grasshopper is inevitably framed as the lowly enabler of far loftier endeavors, the lowest common denominator of computational design thinking, the plumbing underneath –best dealt with in technical workshops and evening tutorials.
This perception is a misunderstanding as a matter of course. With its stark syntactic differences with most other computer languages (one of which is gradually subsuming) and intricate, multi-layered data structures, Grasshopper is nothing if not a complex environment that demands exclusive attention to deliver its full potential. That is the ambition of the course.
The syllabus is based on weekly lectures and applied workshops and is generally geared towards dispensing core technical knowledge suitable for use in core and option studios, as well as in advanced computational courses, such as are currently on offer across the GSD.
The schedule is divided into two main sections on either side of the midterm week (March 26, 2024).
The first section explores the syntax of geometry, with an emphasis on computational and mathematical instruments such as ranges, domains, parameters, and data structures. This part of the course combines (possibly) familiar Grasshopper strategies with decidedly unfamiliar morphogenetic models based on the instructor’s previous offering (VIS 2227 Writing Form, 2017-24). Topics include parametric 3D modelling, procedural tessellation, image processing, and more.
The second half of the course offers a critical introduction to Grasshopper’s essential role as a gateway to complex third-party applications for physical and environmental analysis. Topics will include mechanics/kinematics, environmental performance, and strategies of optimization. This part brings together well-known plugins with the elaborate data structures explored during the first half of the course.
Digital Media: Environmental Geometries
Environmental Geometries investigates techniques for visualizing and designing interactively with hard-to-see environmental forces. This iteration of the class focuses on the geometry of air movement.
Air moves like an invisible ocean around and within buildings in response to differences in pressure. This motion can be described mathematically, but solving these equations in each situation remains a challenging and evolving problem. Ultimately, depicting and understanding a complex phenomenon requires more than one model and more than one mode of inquiry, as well as awareness of each specific model’s limitations.
There must be a space of interactive architectural experimentation with environmental forces, between general principles, like hot air rises, on the one hand, and computational fluid dynamics on the other, accurate enough to allow realistic feedback, but fast and loose enough for iterative conceptual study. This course tries to create such a space between design-play and engineering through empirical study.
This class proposes a back-and-forth process between physical and digital simulations. We will build two physical simulators: a wind tunnel for the simulation of wind-driven ventilation and a salt-water tank for the simulation of buoyancy driven ventilation. We will pair these with two digital simulations: a smoke simulation in Houdini and a fluid simulation developed within the course in C# in Rhino’s grasshopper environment.
Students will experience the friction between the digital and the physical modes and engage with both as flexible approximations of reality. This exploration will be expanded with three additional topics: discussion of the heuristic principles of air movement, the mathematics of air models, and historical examples of design before air conditioning.
Architects are familiar with material experimentation with visible materials. Students don’t need to become carpenters or masons, but they do need methods to explore, experiment, test and fail, with wood or stone, in order to use them creatively in their designs. By analogy, students need methods of experimenting with the invisible material of air, if they are to gain familiarity with its behavior and consider it in their future work.
Alongside the construction of the simulators, students will design a series of models for each simulation and run parallel tests in the computational and physical simulators. Through comparisons, they will develop a formal lexicon for producing specific conditions in the air. In the interaction between two distinct ways of looking at the world, students can discover discrepancies, gain control over tools, and learn when and where to apply different types of analysis.
Digital Media: The Projective Precast
Whether precast or poured-in-place, nearly every concrete structure takes shape with the help of a sacrificial structure: its mold or formwork. Techniques for constructing molds and formworks have evolved countless times over centuries yet remain a ripe territory for reinvention. Waste-reduction, ease-of-use, and reusability affect both construction costs and sustainability. Our ability to distribute material where it needs to be – and to limit waste where it doesn’t – has the potential for even larger impact.
As sustainability concerns and new material technologies drive concrete into ever-more-nimble, ever-more-slender forms, an opposing desire haunts our discipline: a nostalgic yearning for stereotomic thickness. Poché, divorced from its pure structural necessity to historic masonry structures, persists under new alibis in contemporary design. Similarly, the graphic techniques of stereotomy–that is, traditionally, of describing cut stone–find application across a range of computational and geometric applications.
In this course, we will attempt to reclaim a stereotomic understanding of surface development towards the production of low-waste, inexpensive and reusable, sheet-derived mold forms. In contrast to many digitally enabled mold-making processes, we will not work subtractively (i.e. we will not use CNC or other routing techniques to carve a negative from a preexisting volume). Instead, we will apply sheet bending and joining techniques to construct a new kind of mold. Casting into these sheet-derived molds, students will test tectonic, structural, and material variables affecting the form and performance of cast architectural elements.
Students can expect to spend the first half of the course constructing tabletop-scale molds and testing the pouring process through a sequence of tutorial-guided weekly assignments. Leveraging lessons learned from the collective body of research developed in the first half, students will move on to independent or small-group development of a tectonic concept using assembled cast parts.
Landscape Representation II
The Landscape Representation II course will examine the relationship between terrain and the dynamic landscape it supports and engenders.
The course explores and challenges the representational conventions of land-forming and supports a landscape architecture design process that posits the landscape as a relational assemblage of dynamic physical and temporal forces. It investigates the making of landforms through its inherent material performance in relation to ecological processes that describe its connectivity to the ordering and making of the landscape which is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at specific scales.
Measures of time will be utilized to describe and design the landscape through a comparison of sequence and event, and their intervals, rates, and duration in relation to spatial forces and flows. Time infuses the material reality of the landscape through states of formation: from those that signify stability, through sequences that are predictable and observable processes of change, to those that are uncertain and instantaneous.
Representation is approached as an activity of thinking and making in which knowledge is generated through the work. This facilitates an iterative process of reflection in action, enabling testing in which new knowledge informs subsequent design decisions. The course will introduce methods of associative and generative modelling, and quantitative and qualitative analysis visualized through multiple forms of media. These are decision-making models conceived to imbue interaction between evidence-based variables and design input.
Lectures and lab exercises will provide the foundation for exploration and discussion and exposure to a set of digital techniques for analysing and generating landform processes to advance technical and conceptual ability, as well as to provide a point of departure for an in-depth awareness of landscape precedents and representational techniques.
It aims to provide students with an understanding of landscape as a set of complex systems in which duration and matter are encoded within, and driven by, a changing landscape. The course engages in the advanced exploration of digital media, with an emphasis on responsive and performative modelling as well as the fluid transition between documentation and speculation, 2d and 3d, static and dynamic, and digital and analogue media.