Digital Design Exercises for Architecture Students Digital Design Exercises for Architecture Students teaches you the basics of digital design and fabrication tools with creative design exercises, featuring over 200 illustrations, which emphasize process and evaluation as key to design- ing in digital mediums. The book is software neutral, letting you choose the software with which to edit raster and vector graphics and to model digital objects. The clear, jargon-free introductions to key concepts and terms help you experiment and build your digital media skills. During the fabrica- tion exercises you will learn strategies for laser cutting, CNC (computer- numerically controlled) milling, and 3D printing to help you focus on the processes of design thinking. Reading lists and essays from practitioners, instructors, and theorists ground the exercises in both broader and deeper contexts and encourage you to continue your investigative journey. Jason S. Johnson is an associate professor of architecture and co-director of the Laboratory for Integrative Design at the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. He is an award-winning designer and the founder of Minus Architecture Studio. Joshua Vermillion is an assistant professor and SimLab coordinator at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, USA. This page intentionally left blank 1 Digital Design Exercises for Architecture Students Edited by Jason S. Johnson and Joshua Vermillion  First published 2016 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data Names: Johnson, Jason S., editor. | Vermillion, Joshua, editor. Title: Digital design exercises for architecture students / Jason S. Johnson and Joshua Vermillion, editors. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2015034997| ISBN 9781138823129 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781138823143 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781315742229 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Architectural design--Data processing. | Architectural design--Problems, exercises, etc. Classification: LCC NA2728 .D53 2016 | DDC 729.0285--dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034997 ISBN: 978-1-138-82312-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-82314-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74222-9 (ebk) Acquisition Editor: Wendy Fuller Editorial Assistant: Grace Harrison Production Editor: Alanna Donaldson Typeset in Bembo by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Contents Foreword: Digital natives and primitives – the emergence of technological culture ..................................................................................vii Tom Verebes Acknowledgments ....................................................................................xiv Introduction 1 1 A DIGITAL CRAFT FRAMEWORK 5 Andrew Kudless 2 EXERCISES FOR POINTS, LINES, AND CURVES 19 Jason S. Johnson and Joshua Vermillion Exercise set 1: line drivers ...................................................................23 Exercise set 2: algorithmic drawings ....................................................36 Exercise set 3: bridging the gap ...........................................................48 3 DISTRIBUTED SENSATIONS: PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIMENTATION WITH ANONYMITY IN ARCHITECTURE 59 Joshua Taron 4 EXERCISES FOR VOLUMES AND AGGREGATE ASSEMBLIES 77 Jason S. Johnson and Joshua Vermillion Exercise set 4: flat to fat .......................................................................80 Exercise set 5: visual coding .................................................................94 Exercise set 6: accumulations .............................................................103 v Contents 5 ITERATION, FAILURE, AND DISTINCTIONS 117 Marc Fornes 6 EXERCISES FOR ASSEMBLY AND COMMUNICATION 141 Jason S. Johnson and Joshua Vermillion Exercise set 7: geometric and material components ..........................152 Exercise set 8: assemblies .................................................................163 Exercise set 9: tab a slot b ..................................................................172 7 AN ESSAY ON THE IMMERSIVE, OR SOLVING FOR MANICHEAN COMPLICATIONS 183 Simon Kim 8 EXERCISES FOR INTEGRATING DATA AND FORM 195 Jason S. Johnson and Joshua Vermillion Exercise set 10: integrating data and form ..........................................198 Exercise set 11: overlays and edges – mapping to form .....................222 Exercise set 12: ubiquitous simultaneity: composite form-finding ......231 9 LEARNING FROM THE STACK 239 Joshua Taron in conversation with Benjamin H. Bratton Bibliography �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������257 Image credits ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������264 Index �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������269 vi Foreword Digital natives and primitives – the emergence of technological culture Tom Verebes Modern Industry had therefore itself to take in hand the machine, its characteristic instrument of production, and to construct machines by machines.1 Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, p.384 Karl Marx’s machines, which make machines, were recapitulated over a century later in 1969, with Nicholas Negroponte’s forecast of automated “machines to assist the design process.”2 Negroponte highlighted the evo- lutionary capacities and processes with which unique and optimal outcomes can be generated. In today’s emerging technological culture, the inherent intelligence and autopoetic production of machinic-making raises questions of precisely what is the remit of the designer, the limits of his/her design thinking, and, lastly, the possible scope of material production. Also, and perhaps not so coincidentally, in 1969 the cybernetician and early adopter of complexity theory Gordon Pask noted how the role of the designer and his/her relation to the subject was turning towards “the interaction between the designer and the system he designs, rather than the interaction between the system and the people who inhabit it.”3 Pask, polemically, no longer conceived the designer as the controller, or “authoritarian apparatus” of the design outcome, but rather, the designer is now the designer of the apparatus that will design the product.4 He asks where the target for the designer is located and the nature of its outcome. The role of design as a form of control then becomes an “odd mixture of catalyst, crutch, memory and arbiter.”5 From the early anthropology of digital experimentation, pursued sometimes vii Foreword blindly but most often bravely by a generation of digital natives, we are now witnessing the consolidation of the primitive discoveries of early adopters, to the civilization of a maturing technological culture. Publishing a textbook in 2015 on how one learns to design computation- ally raises a paradox of the topic relating to rapidly evolving technologies driven by opportunistic communities of users. Despite the demonstrable cutting-edge design methods, tools, and techniques featured in this book, the longevity of instrumentality of the book’s content should be called into question. The syllabi of architectural courses teaching computational design have so often been updated that there seems to be few, if any, constants in a computational curriculum over the last two decades. This raises the ques- tion of how quickly a book focusing on digital design pedagogy will become a history book soon after its publication. Quickly shifting paradigms and the corresponding rapidity of technological innovations render a textbook simultaneously potentially just so last year, and so quickly, possibly, another important book on the history, or the later archeology of digital practices. This book may not be about teaching computational design. Perhaps this book is more about the establishment of the culture surrounding these tech- nologies than it is an explicit handbook of how to learn and apply the tools themselves. Educating natives: learning not teaching The digital natives represented in this book are evidence of the emergence of an autodidact generation in which teaching has become less effective than learning. Peer-to-peer learning from others, through haptic opportu- nity, accident, and serendipity, has all but rendered obsolete the traditional authoritative role of the teacher to the student absorbing knowledge pas- sively. For years I have been asserting, within the context of designing and amending university curricula, how architecture schools will soon no longer need to “teach” computation. This is not to say that computational design and production will be out of fashion, although there remains no shortage of people in architecture who would wish this to be the case. This implies how digital natives no longer require the basics to be taught. If natives do not know the basics already, they will quickly teach themselves. As a personal anecdote, my son was born definitively in the digital age, in 1999. At the age of 11, in 2010, he phoned me at work to tell me he had downloaded a free software application called Sketch-Up and had modeled our house and had viii Foreword also made an animation fly-through. The authors and designers included in this book, not its younger readers, should tremble at the facility, fluency, and latent power of the next generation, the true digital natives. Collaborative models and the opening of sources In the 1980s, when greed, individuality, and the early days of starchitecture flourished, information was under-valuated and rarified, and the conduits of networks were limited to one-to-one. In a world of digital communica- tion, where we can all quickly access vast flows of information, sent from one to the many, a context of open source sharing is firmly a more powerful resource than any university library can provide the digital learner. Fundamental changes in theories of corporate and managerial organiza- tion in the 1990s were brought about by digitization – or the inception of information and communication technologies into the office (any kind of office), which had effects upon the patterns and tendencies of work. Noteworthy to this Foreword is the shared background of several of the contributors and editors of having completed their Masters’ degree at the Architectural Association (AA) in London. In the series of multiple-year research agendas of the pre-eminent Design Research Lab (DRL) at the AA, at which I had taught and later co-directed the program, the initial research agenda we had pursued was titled Corporate Fields. It was by no accident that this first research agenda focused on the architectural and organiza- tional repercussions of computers, or information and communication tech- nologies, in the workplace. We queried the architectural repercussions of hot-desking, collaboration, informality, and responsiveness. Curiously, and counter to some predictions, by the end of the 1990s, few of us ended up working in our underwear in huts in remote forests, communicating only through screen interfaces and telephones. Despite the benefits of having a good Wi-Fi connection to be able to “work” remotely with anyone, and the crisis of the converse, we need, more than ever, each other, to share our knowledge and expertise, in physically proximate platforms, to learn from each other. Lewis Mumford, in The Myth of the Machine (1944), heralds a “shift from an empirical, tradition-bound technics to an experimental mode” which had opened new technological realms, such as “nuclear energy, supersonic transportation, cybernetic intelligence, and instantaneous distant commu- nication.”6 According to Steven Johnson, the city, both practically and ix