Energy Monitoring 101: Open Standards
In almost every architectural project we undertake at LMN, we urge the client to seriously consider sub-metering and energy monitoring. After years of recommending this, we decided to “eat our own dog food.” We wanted to understand the underlying costs, infrastructure changes, and digital tools necessary for proper energy monitoring so – for our office – we put together our own customized solution based upon open standards hardware and software. Here’s a detailed account of how it’s going…
Grasshopper Canvas with Kinect Interaction: Part 1
In a previous post, we elaborated on how more real estate for the Grasshopper Canvas can be beneficial and usable with Wiimote interaction. Since then, we have been toying around with the Microsoft Kinect (more so after the release of the beta version of the Kinect SDK for the PC), looking to identify a more [...]
Med Mart 4: Facade Design Coordination
The ambitious schedule of the Cleveland Med Mart project required us to reexamine and retool some of the ways we design, document, and deliver a project. As the leaders of the design effort, we knew that we would need to find and build smart connections between our generative design tools and our documentation process in order to not only meet deadlines, but also adapt to the parameters that were developing throughout the design-assist process. This post outlines our linking of Grasshopper and Revit – through a custom utility called Cricket …
Med Mart 3: Daylighting the Atrium
In this post, we move into the interior to talk about how we are using daylight inside the building. A major feature of the design is a large central atrium with a four-story structural glass wall facing the Mall. While providing a good amount of natural light to the atrium, this entirely glazed edge also contrasts greatly with the three other non-glazed walls. We knew we needed a strategy to more effectively balance the light levels throughout the space, and our goal was to achieve that with natural lighting.
Symposium: Craft Kraft craft
The UW College of Built Environments is hosting a two day symposium on High Performance Craft. The event will bring together a number of practitioners and thinkers working at the intersections between emerging technologies and building materials, new and old.
Woodbury’s Elements of Parametric Design
Reviewed: Elements of Parametric Design by Robert Woodbury. If you are new to parametrics, then you will get the lay of the land at this particular point in design history and have a good idea where to begin. If you are a designer already steeped in parametric practice, this book is a quick read and a welcome synthesis of many things you probably have already experienced. For all others, an in-depth review of the design patterns that make up parametric architectural design.
PDX Video: ScriptJigs
I recently gave a talk at Portland State University’s Fridays@4 lecture series. I focused on the relationship between parametrics and performance analysis and gave demos of using Grasshopper, GECO, and Ecotect. The video in this post – recorded during the talk – is an overview of the process and how we use these tools in practice…
Objet Alaris30 3D Printer – Update
In a previous post, we promised an update of the Objet Alaris30 3D Printer after we had used it for a couple of months and put it through the paces of a regular production workload. After four months of regular use, there are a number of things we’ve learned…
Happy Holidays from LMN
Happy Holidays from everyone at LMN.
This Holiday Season, we made “Glowflakes” …a hybrid of snowflakes and LED throwies. Glowflakes!
Seattle EUG: ScriptJIGs
I will be presenting at next week’s Seattle Ecotect Users Group meeting. I’ve been asked to speak on the topic of “scripting.” I’ll explain how LMNts has been employing Grasshopper as a sort of “digital script jig” to guide other tools, including Ecotect. Specifically, I’ll present a number of case studies on how analysis data is brought back into our design environments and how/why/when it is used to inform decisions.
Grasshopper Canvas Real Estate
Grasshopper needs more real estate. We’ve been addressing this problem by moving our Grasshopper definitions to a table-top display, tracking an IR LED light pen for interaction on the canvas. The canvas can take up the entire table-top while the linked geometry can be projected on a nearby wall. We’ve only begun setting up the equipment, but our early tests are promising.
Xenakis’ Reynolds House
We recently had the opportunity to produce a physical scale-model of an unbuilt design of Iannis Xenakis. Xenakis was the Greek/French composer, music-theorist, and architect, best known for his use of mathematical models, stochastic processes, and game theory in his composition. Xenakis was an important influence on the development of electronic music and he also [...]
ACADIA 2010 NYC
The ACADIA 2010 Conference was held at the Cooper Union and the Pratt Institute in New York/Brooklyn this year. Though the overall theme of this year’s ACADIA was contemporary architecture’s stance between the biological and the technical, I can safely say that this year’s conference was dipped in a theoretical stew. This post highlights a number of interesting works amongst the theoretical background noise.
Objet Alaris30 3D Printer
We have spent our first week with our new Objet Alaris30 3D Printer and it’s an impressive piece of hardware. There are upsides (accuracy and ease-of-use) and downsides (noise, smell), but overall this is a very impressive entry-level 3D printer that is certainly architectural office-friendly. Read on for our first-impressions…
Stage Lighting with LEDs, Arduino, & Firefly
We used 10 high-intensity LEDs to light a 1:24 scale model of a studio theater. The LEDs were wired to an Arduino micro-controller and programmed using the Firefly components for Grasshopper. All 10 LEDs can be individually controlled from a Grasshopper definition or wired together (in GH) to form banks of lights. The result is a computer-controlled mini theatrical lighting system on the cheap.
A Breathing Building Skin at ACADIA 2010
Scott will be presenting “A Breathing Building Skin” at the ACADIA 2010 Conference at Cooper Union in New York, taking place October 21st – 24th. The theme of the conference this year is “the changing nature of information and its impact on architectural education, research and practice,” with a focus on the roles of information in the design process, generative and evolutionary modeling, and digital fabrication.
Virtualwind Workflow
Virtualwind is an architect-friendly Computation Fluid Dynamics simulation tool. In a previous post, we briefly outlined the steps involved in setting up a Virtualwind study. This video goes through the entire workflow from start to finish: from cleaning up the geometry in SketchUp to create a watertight model…all the way to visualizing simulation results.
What Would Photoshop Do?
A quick trial of the new “Content Aware” tools in Adobe Photoshop CS5 shows that it’s a fairly smart. This is certainly a huge time saver in production Photoshop work. What’s next for Photoshop? Removing ornament instead of adding it?
Terzidis’ Algorithmic Architecture
Is the algorithm a radically new way of generating form or just another tool for design? Though this presents a false-fork, it does caricature two sides of an imbalanced debate…a debate that Algorithmic Architecture enters into in an odd way. Reviewed: Algorithmic Architecture (2006) by Kostas Terzidis.
Interactive Architecture by Fox & Kemp Reviewed
Interactive Architecture is a monsters compendium of recent work; it is a catalog and survey of current trends. While it has the heft of a textbook, Interactive Architecture is a quick read. If you need a starting point (who doesn’t?), Interactive Architecture is a great one.
AIA Seattle: Parametrics for Sustainability
AIA Seattle is sponsoring a Grasshopper Tech Demo: Parametrics for Sustainability meeting. Part demo, part discussion, this event will feature two Seattle-based firms’ use of an increasingly popular design tool.
Date: May 25, 5:00-6:30 pm
Location: The Miller|Hull Partnership
Cost: Free
Task-Based Interface Presentation Takeaways
LMN recently had the pleasure of presenting a session on customizing the MicroStation V8i task-based interface at Bentley Systems’ 2010 user conference, Be Together. This was a 1 hour presentation in which real-world examples of simple and advanced techniques for modifying task-based interfaces, including creating custom icons, tools, tasks, and named expressions, were presented. Other new features in V8i SELECTseries 1 were also covered, such as Main task customization, workflows and reference tasks.
Grasshopper to ANSYS
If you’ve played with Grasshopper then you know how much fun it can be to throw the sliders back and forth and watch your geometry change. What if you wanted to get analysis data for everyone of those iterations? Parametric modeling eases the task of generating multiple iterations, but it can be a bit laborious [...]
Generative Components Speed Ramps
Parking, parking, parking ramps. While not the most glamorous part of a building, parking speed-ramps are one of the most common. Even on a reasonably rectilinear project, parking speed ramps almost always have inner-slopes and outer-slopes, sometimes banking downward or upward as the case may be. Figuring out the slope may not be mathematically difficult, but modeling is tedious, and re-modeling is a waste of time. This is a perfect opportunity to do some scripting.