Type

30% lecturing
50% hands-on exercises on personal laptops
20% discussion

Workshop objectives

Ioannis Mirtsopoulos will introduce Libra, a Grasshopper plugin for Rhino3D, to architects (researchers and practitioners) interested in structural design and design space exploration. The tool allows the incremental generation of numerous diverse reticulated conceptual structures in a semi-automated way within predefined design domains and for predefined loads without any knowledge of structural mechanics. Particularly, it provides an easy and intuitive workflow for structural design, beneficial to understand how the flow of forces affects the design of structures. Overall, it is a design approach that provokes creativity and aims to unveil unprecedented structural forms.

Participants requirements

Required skills: No prior experience in (shape) grammars is required, but some basic knowledge of Grasshopper will be necessary
Required software: Rhinoceros 7
Libra plugin to be freely downloaded from food4rhino
https://www.food4rhino.com/en/app/libra
https://github.com/StructuralXplorationLab/Libra
Required hardware: Personal computers (laptops Windows/ Mac)

Workshop description

The workshop focuses on a grammar for structural design, which has been developed during the doctoral studies of the instructor. A computational framework that integrates the developed theory into a fully functioning Grasshopper plug-in has been implemented, named Libra. The tool allows the incremental generation of numerous diverse reticulated conceptual structures in a semi-automated way within predefined design domains and for predefined loads, without any knowledge of structural mechanics. Particularly, it provides an easy and intuitive workflow for structural design, beneficial to understand how the flow of forces affects the design of structures. The integration of static equilibrium conditions ensures designers that the generated design candidates are always in static equilibrium and no further post-processing to impose equilibrium is required. This design workflow aims at provoking creativity. Overall, it is a generative, algorithmic & evolutionary design approach that integrates interactive genetic algorithms and aims to unveil unprecedented structural forms.

During the workshop emphasis will be put on newly implemented features. Precisely, how generative transformations are constrained within numerical bounds that are translated into geometric domains. Such transformation constraints aim at controlling the generative process while considering constructability and/or aesthetics. At the beginning of the workshop the theory of the generative grammars that support the workflow will be provided. After, the participants will be guided for the generation of 2D and 3D structurally valid design candidates. The workshop targets architects with interest in conceptual structural design and grammar rules. No prior experience in (shape) grammars is required, but some basic knowledge of Grasshopper will be necessary.

Past AAG publications tackle with creativity, structural design and generative/evolutionary design and therefore the instructor is convinced that the AAG community perfectly matches the target group of the developed plug-in. Particularly, topology, graphs and geometric manipulations, which constitute the core elements of the proposed workshop, are remarkable aspects of architectural geometry and thus enhance the relevance of the topic to AAG.

Target group

architects with interest in conceptual structural design and grammar rules

Number of participatns max.

12

Duration and Procedure