All posts in Reviews
DIVA is Awesome and Everyone Should Use It
We’ve been playing around with the DIVA plugin for Rhino and Grasshopper for the past month. DIVA stands for Design Iterate Validate Adapt which is similar to the approach that we take with parametric modeling.
By looking at a large number of iterations it often is possible to tease out patterns of performance which can help to find a “satisficing” solution and help designers to develop a better intuition about how to approach a problem.
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.
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…
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…
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.
Mark Reddington at the UW’s CBE
Last month, Mark Reddington, FAIA, discussed his work as a partner at LMN. Mark spoke in detail about Vancouver Convention Centre West – which served as the media center for the 2010 Winter Olympics – LMN’s history on the UW campus, building PACCAR Hall, home to the Foster School of Business, as well as the Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science & Engineering. Mark stressed the collaborative aspects of LMN’s work: “Making places and making buildings in not simply an individual effort, but something we all do together…”
TAS Ambiens Workflow
Though Ambiens is technically a piece of CFD software, it allows for rapid modeling (when you get used to its quirks) and very quick simulations (often less than 2 minutes). After playing with Ambiens for about an hour, you should be able to run relatively complex studies…which is a-typical of most airflow modeling software…so as quirky as the software is, the “bang for the buck” is fairly good.