core.form-ula

The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) proposes a unique partnership with SOM to support the educational mission of the school to educate architects to engage, speculate and innovate. The following is a proposal for a collaborative SOM design computation research program with faculty and students from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Los Angeles, California. The proposal seeks to build a repeatable structure for design research with SOM that is extensible within the SCI-Arc curricular constraints. SCI-Arc will undertake a research seminar to be lead by faculty Dr. David Jason Gerber.

The objective of the research seminar will be to engage in collaborative design and research focusing on computational design techniques, advanced digital design for fabrication and prototyping. The course will follow a design research seminar format with reviews and critiques to develop all phases of research, analysis, synthesis and intervention(s).

SCI-Arc will be receiving financial support from SOM thus allowing for a more thorough body of student research. These funds would supplement the amount budgeted and paid for by the school for the research seminar and, would be used to offset production costs for course work and for the production of a publication documenting the work produced as a result of the course of study. Both the enhanced presentation materials and the publication would enrich the educational experience and allow students to produce real-world presentation materials. A symposium is proposed to follow the completion of the project work.

As a respected institution with an international reputation, SCI-Arc has the ability to pull together a stellar team of experts to look at all aspects of design, digital design, fabrication, prototyping and presentation. With this collaboration, SCI-Arc students will have the opportunity, under the leadership of experienced faculty member Dr. David Jason Gerber, and in conjunction with SOM architects and engineers, to engage in a deep understanding of SOM’s use of digital design technologies and strategies.  SOM will have access to the expertise of the SCI Arc faculty combined with the eager minds of SCI-Arc students.  In turn, the school’s students will have the unique opportunity to work on one or more real-world projects, proposals, or researches of interest to the firm, responding to the needs and desires of SOM’s actual, clients or experimentation needs.

2.0    INSTRUCTIONAL CAPABILITY

Established over 30 years ago as an educational laboratory, SCI-Arc aims to be the archetypal inner-city institution for architecture and planning in the world. An independent, non-profit school of architecture offering Bachelor and Master degrees, SCI-Arc forges alliances with international communities and practices, builds value into downtown Los Angeles, and advances critical and creative solutions to engage a fluid world. The SCI-Arc pedagogy values cross-disciplinary and hybrid programming, deploys technological tools in new applications, and uniquely prepares students to meet unprecedented global challenges.

As an integral part of the emerging cultural hub of a city with a tradition of architectural experimentation, the school is devoted to finding radically new responses to the real needs and aspirations of today’s world.  SCI-Arc is distinguished by the vibrant atmosphere of our studios, where some 500 students and 80 faculty members—mostly practicing architects—work together in a fluid, non-hierarchical manner, re-examining assumptions and exploring and testing new ideas through making.  Accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board and the Western Association of Schools Pand Colleges, SCI-Arc has increasingly been seen as the American port of entry for new urban projects and ideas from around the world, beyond traditional practices.

3.0    COURSE DESCRIPTION:
Informing Form through Design Computation in Practice,
Sponsored Design Research with SOM

The course is as a Design and Computation Research Seminar in which SCI-Arc will utilize a collaborative, structured, research-focused and design-led instruction process. SCI-Arc will communicate with identified SOM personnel in a journey of investigation, discussion, design exploration and evaluation that will generate an innovative series of conceptual strategies and architectural and possibly planning design proposals and solutions.  The educational goal will be to find radical ways of framing a given problem(s) and solve the challenges put forward in the seminar with innovative technology enabled design strategies and meaningful research.

The course is structured to engage with one or more SOM supported investigations focused on the use of design computation as a means to conceptually explore and critically evaluate in collaboration with the SCI Arc faculty principle investigator and students. This proposal is seen as an opportunity for SOM to gain access to the talents of SCI Arc students and equally for SCI Arc students to gain access to the talent of the digital design expertise and experiences with SOM’s leading practitioners. The primary purpose of the proposal is to facilitate an experimental collaboration between SOM and SCI Arc students and faculty to design explore through design computation both from the vantage point of practice and research.

4.0    COURSE OBJECTIVES: Research Agenda

The research agenda focuses on experimentation with advanced techniques for building, fabrication and urban design problems. This includes researching aspects and definitions of performative design, associative parametric design, design optimizations, and invention of computational design techniques, processes, and formalisms and sensibilities. It is expected that the particular research problems for each seminar will be agreed upon by the SCI Arc principle investigator, with input from the SCI Arc directors, and SOM and will focus on contributing to both SOM and the student’s experience and use of design computations as a body of knowledge and research and on the pedagogical value for the participating students. It is understood that the work product of the students within the seminar is intended to address a set of SOM and SCI Arc defined design problems. The emphasis of the design research collaboration is to experimentally explore digital design and computation tools, techniques, and methodologies. This will include the systems and software already in use and provided by SCI Arc to its students but as well will include input and provision of any other necessary tools from the SOM team. Over time the collaboration may require additional support in terms of hardware and software to be determined in concert.

The design research seminar(s) emphasizes collaboration, instruction and understanding and implementation of technologies including, associative parametric design, and the first principles of design computation and the value of informing form through incorporations of all aspects of design computation. Students will gain a basic proficiency and knowledge of associative parametric design technologies and other tool sets. The course will also support all other technologies seen as useful in the analysis, synthesis, and resolution of the agreed upon design problems. We will then begin to explore more advanced computational techniques including basic instruction in scripting, recursion, abstraction and logical constructs for creation of polyvalent pluri-potent patterns and formalisms dependent on agreed upon projects suited to the SCI Arc curriculum and SOM’s needs. Examples of top down and bottom up and generative design strategies will be presented and re-invented. Via incorporations of a myriad of project information types including site, program, organization, security and safety, environment, material and assembly constraints to name a few, issues of planning and architectural tectonics will be associatively modeled, tested and resolved. The research collaboration will be structured around a design problem(s) such as a competition, a project based proposal or combination thereof. Students will design explore with the SOM as a design team including the building and inventing of digital design strategies, prototyping strategies using 3D printing technologies and other fabrication tools.

Design Research Collaboration Structure includes the following:
1.    Lectures: SOM, PI, and Guest experts
2.    Site Visits: if necessary
3.    Tutorials:  SOM, PI and Guest experts
4.    Projects: To be decided on an on-going basis (see below)

ANALYSIS
The focus of the first part of the course will to be to identify a set of design researches and to establish the student teams and SOM participation. Likely projects will focus on either systems of one large project or independent systems of different projects. These may include the following:
1.    Parametric Urbanism(s)
2.    Housing typologies
3.    Tower typologies
4.    Shed typologies
5.    Building sub-systems, structure, cores, and skins

SYNTHESIS
The course will synthesize the analysis and research information into weekly assigned deliverables. All seminar research, analysis and explorations will be assembled into a dossier as a resource for the “intervention” phase of the work. Student teams will then begin developing design strategies and prototyping interventions.

INTERVENTION
From among the constellation of issues and projects addressed during the analysis and synthesis phase of the course, student teams will be assigned a project and set of conditions from which to develop/ design explore an architectural intervention. Interventions will be expected to address SOM’s unique project problems and or research interests, as well as engage in critical thinking about how to innovate formally and technologically with design computation.

PARTNERSHIP
SOM has agreed to act as a partner in the course problematization, support, and critique. This partnership will facilitate privileged access to SOM architects, engineers, and teams. Students and the principle investigator will be expected to focus on problems devised in concert and agreement with our sponsor SOM.

SCI-Arch / SOM Research Initiative
Proposed topics for exploration

Early-Stage Environmental Analysis
How might we develop working design methodologies to support rule-of-thumb environmental analysis, targeted for early stages in the design process? While many robust tools and procedures exist for precisely analyzing the environmental performance of a design proposal, most are too time-consuming and costly to perform during the early stages of a design. In these conceptual phases, what is needed more than
precision or robustness, is speed and ease-of-use. A qualitative thumbnail sketch of the performance of a conceptual design, provided quickly, is far more useful than a precise quantitative analysis.

Working with environmental engineers and designers with a background in environmental analysis, students will develop working methods which allow designers to test early-stage design iterations, and receive feedback regarding their performance without the direct aid of an environmental specialist. This will involve both the production of utilities (small scripts and applets), and the establishment of working conventions which allow for this automation to take place.

SOM Champions: Ajmal Aqtash, Marzia Sedino

Building Core Modeler
How to codify a set of learned design tropes, accumulated institutionally through decades of practical design experience, into a formal design grammar?

Automating any aspect of the design process, no matter how determined and rule-bound this process might seem, is always a tricky business. Automation of this sort begins with the definition of a “design grammar”, which may be understood as a set of design elements (lexicon), a set of possible relationships between these elements (syntax), and larger patterns of these related elements which form cohesive and meaningful designs (semantics). Here at SOM, we’ve set out to build a tool (classified as a “design assist / design enable” tool) which partially automates an essential part of our process of designing tall buildings – the
design of the building core. While quite of a bit of the framework has been laid for the practical execution of this tool as a piece of working software, much work remains in formalizing the essential logic of the system: its design grammar.

Drawing from the decades of practical experience in building core design here at SOM, students in this group will further the formal definition of the core modeler design grammar. This definition might take place in one or more of many logic-driven design environments.

SOM Champions: Donghoon Yang

Responsive Kinetic Facades
What are the potential benefits of and obstacles to a responsive kinetic facade system?

Solar conditions are constantly changing. If a building could respond to that change, reflecting solar heat and light when required and absorbing this energy when needed, it could mean both a significant reduction in the required load of the mechanical systems of the building, as well as a significant increase in the potential energy produced by photovoltaics. In this scenario, a building might become something like a living solar tracker – responding to and recording the sun’s path over the course of the day.

While designing the façade for a particular project here at SOM, one team asked this question, and sought to design a manufacturable kinetic facade system. Starting with a standard IGU, the team applied a hinged glass pane and spandrel panel laminated with photovoltaic cells. Using a magnetic control switch (powered by the photovoltaics), a pair of actuators, and a thermal sensor, the team created a “flexible skin”, capable of actuating based on data received from the thermal sensor. Based on preliminary tests, we’ve found that even a small six degree angular shift can result in a twenty-five percent reduction in the amount of solar heat gain inside the building. Students working in this group will build upon this existing prototype design, making further refinements, proposing alternate solutions, and analyzing the performances and potential
benefits of each.

SOM Champions: Micheal Sims

Atlas of Panelization
Is it possible to develop an “atlas of panelization”, which may be understood to be both a set of generative rules, as well as a lexicon of examples implemented on archetypical tower forms?

Surface panelization, or the subdivision of a surface-based geometric model of a design into smaller manufacturable bits, is often misunderstood to be a simple mathematical task – reduced to simple matter of patterning, perhaps to be completed at the push of a button. In reality, it is a nuanced design problem; dependant both on the intentionality of previous moves and later requirements, and requiring a good  understanding of the broader design intent.

Students working in this group will develop an “atlas of panelization”, something like a cookbook for designers presented with the problem of developing a project in this way. In addition to offering a “push-button” automated set of solutions performed on archetypical tower forms, this research will offer a breakdown of how to go about arriving at one’s own solutions, including common heuristics and examples of how this problem has been addressed in the past.

SOM Champions:Kyle Steinfeld

Structural Performance Driven Design
What new formal possibilities are afforded by contemporary methods of computational structural analysis?

Structural performance has been employed as the primary driver in design many times since the onset of the Modern movement. Most notably by designers such as Nervi, Gaudi, Otto, and Calatrava have brilliantly employed analog analytical methods to produce designs both beautiful and structurally efficient. Recent advances in the speed, fidelity, and widespread availability of computational optimization techniques have opened up new possibilities for this technique.

Working alongside SOM structural engineers and designers, students working in this group will explore the new formal possibilities afforded by these advances in structural analysis software through the development of a case-study design: a urban-scale canopy covering a public space between two towers. Students will consider structural efficiency, material economization, and aesthetic novelty.

SOM Champions:William Baker

Living Green and Easy: Low-Tech Environmentally-Friendly Skins

What might environmentally sensitive exterior wall design look like for the “rest of the world”, where fabrication cost, availability of technology, and simplicity of construction become overwhelmingly important parameters?

Too often, the problem of environmentally responsive design is seen solely through the lens of technological innovation. The high-tech solutions brought about by this approach, while progressive and inventive, are often overly optimistic about the pace at which new technologies can be developed and deployed as real-world construction systems. This issue becomes increasingly pressing as a majority of construction projects (and a majority of the greenhouse gas emissions) shifts to the developing world.

Students working in this group will, alongside SOM designers and engineers, seek to develop environmentally sensitive architectural solutions which require simple fabrication techniques, do not limit formal and architectural expression, and can be deployed practically and effectively in developing countries. Focusing on the local opportunities and requirements of a particular case-study site (Chennai, India), students will produce designs for exterior wall and roof systems based upon the environmental constraints of this tropical climate, as well as the cultural constraints of locally available manufacturing, labor, and material.

SOM Champions: Ajmal Aqtash, Marzia Sedino

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