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Publication Search Results

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Sketches Count: The Mies Van Der Rohe’s Dirksen Courthouse Archive Redrawn

2023-12-06 , Park, James

Mies van der Rohe’s Everett McKinley Dirksen United States Courthouse in Chicago built in 1964 is arguably one of the most significant buildings in the history of judicial architecture in the United States and abroad because of its transformative role in the formulation of the conventions underlying contemporary courthouse design. Archived in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art New York, a significant resource associated with the design of the courthouse is the extensive documentation of the design process at the office of Mies. This body of work consists of 135 sketches, diagrams, and drawings, features alternative solutions, variational schemes, and sectional innovations, and provides an untapped resource to allow a closer look at the expressive range of the architectural language and the technical innovations proposed by one of the most influential architects of the twentieth century. The research takes on the Mies van der Rohe Archive and begins to flesh out the implicit design possibilities that the preliminary representations from the design process of the Dirksen Courthouse present: Are all these possibilities parts of the final scheme that was promoted in the end? If not, are there common themes that pervade each one of them? How important are some design ideas that belong exclusively to some of them but did not appear in the final design? To speculate these in depth, how much effort would it take to complete each of the design variations outlined by the preliminary representations? Can they be completed given the clues in the final design? If not, is it because they are not productive or they are just not compliant with the final scheme? In the end, how significant is this design process to contemporary courthouse design? The work here attempts to address these questions through a formal specification of a shape grammar that foregrounds common characteristics and unique ideas presented in the set of preliminary representations. Ambitiously, the work proposes a formal reconstruction of the final courtroom floor plan of the Dirksen Courthouse and an automated completion of the preliminary representations of key courtroom floor design variations from the design process of the courthouse, materializing the unrealized possibilities embodied in them. More specifically, a generative description of Mies van der Rohe’s courthouse design language is presented in the form of a shape grammar designed and implemented in the Shape Machine, a pioneering recursive shape rewriting technology. The grammar is proposed as an open-ended set of shape rules that can be readily expanded to complete an increasing number of design variations documented in the archive and generate some hypothetical ones that can be, in principle, generated by this dynamic grammar. Significantly, at any moment, new shape rules can be introduced seamlessly, as an intrinsic part of the design process of the grammar, without requiring the reformatting of existing rules or advocating the design of a singular Miesian grammar. The work concludes with a critical assessment of the sequences of the rule applications for the generation of complete courtroom floor plans. The contributions of the dissertation are (a) a generative description of Mies van der Rohe’s courthouse design language in the form of a shape grammar that is designed based on the final design of the Dirksen Courthouse and its design process documented in the Mies van der Rohe Archive at the Museum of Modern Art New York; (b) a formal reconstruction of the final courtroom floor plan of the courthouse; (c) an automated completion of the preliminary representations of key courtroom floor design variations from the design process of the courthouse; (d) a critical account on the significance of the design process of the courthouse in the contemporary courthouse design discourse with an emphasis on the innovative sectional idea of the courtrooms as an unrealized possibility in the making of the final courtroom floor plan, which still remains to be rediscovered in the designing of new courthouses; and (e) some speculations on the significance of the computational method developed for the research in the field of shape computation and on its potential role in bridging the gaps between sketching, diagramming, drafting, and modeling in the digital workflows of architects and designers.

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The venation lattice

2020-08-06 , Ferro, Emanuel

Nature offers an inexhaustible source of inspiration for design. Among the various lenses deployed to look at nature, symmetry continues to play one of the most profound ones that have continuously used in the description and interpretation of the study of natural form. This study takes on the five fundamental translational structures of the Euclidean plane, the five Dirichlet domains, and correlates them with motifs extracted front the vein architecture of leaf growth patterns, to propose: a) a particular class of designs characterized by planar translational structure; b) a formal specification of these designs in terms of a shape grammar, the venation lattice grammar; c) an automated implementation of the venation lattice grammar in the Shape Machine – the first general purpose shape grammar interpreter that can carry visually shape computations; and d) a series of digital fabrications of designs in the language. Implications pertain to the visual study of shape, the immediacy of working directly with shapes as opposed to a symbolic or discursive representation of shape in a programming language, and its automated computation in a visual interpreter are discussed throughout the work.

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Shape Machine: shape embedding and rewriting in visual design

2021-07-27 , Hong, Tzu-Chieh Kurt

Shape grammar interpreters have been studied for more than forty years addressing several areas of design research including architectural, engineering, and product design. At the core of all these implementations, the operation of embedding – the ability of a shape grammar interpreter to search for subshapes in a geometry model even if they are not explicitly encoded in the database of the system – resists a general solution. It is suggested here that beyond a seemingly long list of technological hurdles, the implementation of shape embedding, that is, the implementation of the mathematical concept of the “part relation” between two shapes, or equivalently, between two drawings, or between a shape and a design, is the single major obstacle to take on. This research identifies five challenges underlying the implementation of shape embedding and shape grammar interpreters at large: 1) complex entanglement of the calculations required for shape embedding and a shape grammar interpreter at large, with those required by a CAD system for modeling and modifying geometry; 2) accumulated errors caused by the modeling processes of CAD systems; 3) accumulated errors caused by the complex calculations required for the derivation of affine, and mostly, perspectival transformations; 4) limited support for indeterminate shape embedding; 5) low performance of the current shape embedding algorithms for models consisting of a large number of shapes. The dissertation aims to provide a comprehensive engineering solution to all these five challenges above. More specifically, the five contributions of the dissertation are: 1) a new architecture to separate the calculations required for the shape embedding and replacement (appropriately called here Shape Machine) vs. the calculations required by a CAD system for the selection, instantiation, transformation, and combination of shapes in CAD modeling; 2) a new modeling calibration system to ensure the effective translation of geometrical types of shapes to their maximal representations without cumulative calculating errors; 3) a new dual-mode system of the derivation of transformations for shape embedding, including a geometric approach next to the known algebraic one, to implement the shape embedding relation under the full spectrum of linear transformations without the accumulated errors caused by the current algorithms; 4) a new multi-step mechanism that resolves all cases of indeterminate embeddings for shapes having fewer registration points than those required for a shape embedding under a particular type of transformation; and 5) a new data representation for hyperplane intersections, the registration point signature, to allow for the effective calculation of shape embeddings for complex drawings consisting of a large number of shapes. All modules are integrated into a common computational framework to test the model for a particular type of shapes – the shapes consisting of lines in the Euclidean plane in the algebra U12.

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Language spoken around the world: lessons from Le Corbusier

2010-01-22 , Masud, Rabia

Le Corbusier's method of creating Architecture in all regions of the world is endlessly rich in techniques. While it is impossible to exactly know his thoughts as he created his modern compositions that skillfully addressed contextual cues, I present a thesis of how Corbusier approached different sites and masterfully created residences that were places "where happiness is born". I will use Shape Grammars and formulate my own languages that will recreate Corbusier's two Monol houses: Maison Jaoul in Paris and Sarabhai Villa in Ahmedabad. Furthermore, I will expand on these houses by creating other iterations, and transforming the grammars to understand critical major and minor moves. In the end I hope to derive architectural lessons that come from formal exercises that can be used in future design processes. I explore this practical effort by creating designs for a site in Midtown, Atlanta. I compare the process of using Shape Grammars with that of the typical studio approach. In conclusion, I find that Shape Grammars allows one to produce iterations that connect to the lessons of the original houses in an intuitive manner.

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The Portman Variations: A Critical Approach to Entelechy I Mediated by Shape Machine

2020-10-20 , Ligler, Heather Michelle

John Portman’s work is perplexing and polarizing. Characterized by his atria that captivate the popular imagination and his hybrid practice as architect-developer that redefined skylines throughout the world, but also ambivalently caricatured and dismissed for these same moves, the question of his impact remains blurry. This tension in Portman’s assessment has been described as paradoxical and in fact, a closer look at the scholarship on his work reinforces this as an ongoing condition – one that highlights the challenges of interpreting the work. Yet, Portman’s own imaginative account of his practice emphasizes another perspective. In reflections throughout his life, he referenced his 1964 house, Entelechy I, as the generator informing his entire corpus and the key design to understanding his architectural principles across all scales and programs. The research here takes on the productive myth of Entelechy I – and its presumed adaptable and repetitive logic – as the impetus to develop a shape grammar on the plan of the house. This grammar is then the basis for generating variations that address the transformation of spatial relationships in the house revisited for other design contexts. Significantly, this two-stage procedure is mechanically (and automatically) implemented in Shape Machine for Rhino, a new shape grammar interpreter developed at the Shape Computation Lab (SCL) in the School of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology. Subsequently, the implementation of the Entelechy grammar reproduces the design of the original house and a series of new designs too – here proposed as Portm-Inoes to systematically recontextualize the house as a postmodern reinvention of Corbusier’s Dom-Ino. In addition, the corresponding adaptation of parts of the grammar under different predicates yields transformation grammars that generate a series of plans at various scales to interpret Portman’s broader corpus of interior, hospitality, urban, and residential designs. The contributions of the dissertation are: a) a critical compilation of perspectives on John Portman encompassing various interpretations that have remained so far distinct including connections to the Aristotelian and Emersonian philosophical underpinnings of the work; b) a formal approach to interpret Entelechy I in an automated shape grammar; c) a series of implemented transformation grammars that further redescribe Portman’s architectural language in interior, hospitality, urban, and residential designs; d) an assessment of Portman’s work derived by correlating the predicates, transformations, and shape rules in the grammars with fundamental aspects of design including the use of Platonic geometries, self-similarity, figure-ground reversal, boundary ornamentation, offset forms, and their combinations; and e) the setup of a constructive cycle of design propositions and evaluations achieved in Shape Machine to mechanically execute line drawings in an automated environment.

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Emergent symmetries: a group theoretic analysis of an exemplar of late modernism: the smith house by Richard Meier

2008-07-07 , Din, Edouard Denis

Formal systems in architectural design aim at the systematic description, interpretation, and evaluation of existing works of architecture as well the systematic creation of new works of architecture. Currently all formal analysis using group theoretical tools focus on repetitive designs that show immediately their recursive structure. It is suggested here that highly complex designs can still be described and analyzed with group theoretical manner. The broader question that is opened up here is whether a complex architecture object or part depending on the interest of the researcher, can be interpreted as a layered object whose parts are all related symmetrically; in other words whether an asymmetric shape or configuration can be understood in terms of nested arrangements of some order of symmetry. The object of analysis has been polemically selected here to be the NY5 architecture, a set of designs that are all clearly exemplifying formal qualities of abstraction, layering, complexity, depth and so on, all appearing impenetrable to a systematic and rigorous analysis using the existing group theoretical formal methods. For example, Richard Meier s work has been presented here as a hyper-refinement of the modernist imagery. The computation is entirely visual. A reassembly of the layered symmetries explains the structure of the symmetry of the house and provides an illustration of the basic thesis of this research on the foundation of a theory of emergence based on symmetry considerations. All plans of the house are represented in three different levels of abstraction moving successively away from the architectural representation to a purely diagrammatic one that foregrounds divisions of space. All representations are fed into an analysis algorithm to pick up all symmetry relationships and the parts are constructed as instances of a binary composition of a family of rectangular grids. Finally the process is reversed to fully account for the construction of the space of the house as a three dimensional layered composition. Lastly, this research points to two categories of extension; a) on the improvement of the system itself; and b) on the interpretative capabilities it affords for the construction and evaluation of critical languages of design.

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